


Pedestal

by Recourse



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, F/F, First Time, Fluffier Than Anticipated, Healing, Masturbation, Mental Illness, Mutual Pining, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-19
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-03 04:28:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6596662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Recourse/pseuds/Recourse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Max ensures that Chloe won't die and that she will never end up in the Dark Room, everything should be fine. But a week of renewed friendship and a case closed aren't enough to fix Chloe's head, or clear a hundred false memories from Max.</p><p>AU where Max has time-travel powers, but there are no supernatural consequences like megastorms, merely personal ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Clinging to Driftwood

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Tiếng Việt available: [Bệ Đỡ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12226563) by [TheGreyLoner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGreyLoner/pseuds/TheGreyLoner)



Chloe sits at her desk, rapping her nails on it, over and over. The morning light washes over her face. She’s reading Twitter, watching Arcadia Bay freak out about Jefferson in real-time. Another thing Max saved her from. The final piece in the horror-show of the past week. David’s gonna be so fuckin’ smug when he gets home.

Max stirs behind her, shifting the covers on Chloe’s bed. Chloe resists turning. She’d been tossing and turning all night, keeping Chloe awake. She’d finally given up and decided she’d stay up. Watch out for her, maybe. Or maybe sleep was just hard when she knew everything that she did.

A sigh from behind her. “Chloe,” Max says to the air.

“Something up, Max?”

“When she comes back, what happens to me?”

Chloe’s nails scrape into the desk, leaving visible scratches. “Shit, dude, how would I know?”

“You were here the last time that I...”

 _You asked me to end your life_ , Chloe hears in her head.

“Was I different when I came back?” Max asks. There’s something in her voice.

Chloe tries to remember, then decides not to. “You, uh, groped me.”

“Chloe.”

“What? What the hell do you want me to say?” Chloe swivels in her chair, sees Max lying on her back, staring into the ceiling. Her fingers are clasped on her stomach, nails biting into the skin on the backs of her hands. “Jesus, Max, you’re the one with the time travel powers, not me. I’m barely keeping up.”

“I just...” Max turns over. “I don’t know. I don’t remember what I did before I came back that day. I remember the alternate version. So when she comes back...does she replace me? Do I lose the memory of this conversation? Of the rest of last night? Is she only going to remember...what she came back from?” Chloe hears a sob, and bolts up out of her chair. “Am I just...killing myself, over and over, trying to make everything right, tearing everything apart—”

Her voice is small and fading into tears, and Chloe can’t fucking stand it. She marches over to Max’s side of the bed and takes her hands off her face, squeezes them tight. Chloe kneels to look her in the eye. Her blue eyes shine when she looks at Chloe. Wet streaks fall down her face, crossing her freckles.

“Max...” Chloe breathes, in, out. “Max, I don’t know. I’m not, like, a physicist or anything. I-if she doesn’t remember, when she comes back, I’ll tell her about this. Okay? We can’t—your powers, they’re...”

“Tell her not to use them anymore. We did what we were supposed to. We stopped him. We...we got justice for Rachel, and Kate.” Max shudders. “She—I—we can’t keep doing this. We can’t.”

Chloe hugs her then. It seems like the only thing to do, as they wait for the other Max, the...Prime Max? To come back. And take her away.

“No matter what,” Chloe whispers, “You saved the fucking day, SuperMax. Or one of you did.”

Max holds her close, even in this awkward position. It feels nice. Despite everything, it feels really nice to hold onto Max, the way Max has held onto her this whole week, tearing time itself apart to save her. Chloe doesn’t deserve it. Not at all. But if she can help this Max through her...her death, then maybe she can make a start. Max has already seen her through a hundred deaths. The only repayment is loyalty.

Max goes limp in her arms. Just the briefest second, but Chloe _knows_.

A different Max pulls away. Her hands move up to Chloe’s shoulders, shaking. “What happened?”

Chloe swallows. This Max’s face is different. Not physically, obviously, but the way it seems stretched taut across her bones, waiting for an answer. The tear-streaks are still there. And the freckles. It’s still Max. Sort of.

_Fuck._

“Chloe, please, talk to me, it’s me, I’m—”

“I know,” Chloe chokes. Sniffs. Is an obvious fucking mess.

“Chloe,” and Max’s hand is on her face, “What _happened_?”

“Don’t—don’t _fucking—_ ” Chloe stands up and pivots, refusing to look at her, to feel her touch. She’s stiff. Can’t answer. Can’t think. Fuck, this was supposed to be the _easy_ part, and then the dead Max had to bring up the fact that she was dying. And then new-old-Max had to look at her like that, touch her like that.

“Chloe,” and the something is back in Max’s voice, “Please. Tell me I did it, tell me—”

“He’s in jail. Nobody’s dead. You don’t have to fuck with time anymore. You fucking did it, all right? You saved my worthless ass again. Happy?” Anger, self-loathing, that’s easy. It comes out of her like a flood.

“What?” Chloe hears her stand up, and she closes her eyes. She can’t _look_ at her. She doesn’t deserve to. “Chloe, why are you—Please, what’s wrong? What did I do?”

“I just fucking told you.” Max’s hand lights on her shoulder and she shrugs it off violently. “Fuck, Max, why would you—you get these incredible fucking powers, and you waste them on _me_ —”

“Chloe!” The something in her voice is desperation. The same notes as last night, when _this_ Max was begging her not to die. “What are you _talking_ about, of course I’m going to save you, why wouldn’t I?” Max circles around in front of her, her hands itching at her sides, afraid to touch her. Chloe looks down. “Chloe, please,” and there’s a hint of a sob, “What did I do?”

Chloe can’t explain, because she doesn’t really understand. She just _feels_. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make any sense, and all she can focus on is the idea that Max had wiped herself away at least twice just to keep Chloe happy and safe. That’s too much. It just is.

Max repeats her name. She asks the only question that matters to her again, this time with a look and a hand on Chloe’s shoulder. Chloe has to try. To get something out. The way Max is looking at her, she knows that keeping silent will hurt her just as much as yelling at her did.

Why is it so much easier to scream at Max than to tell her the truth?

“Before you came back,” she starts, and her breath catches in her throat. She swallows and powers through it. “Before you came back, the-the other you said that she’d disappear, or stop existing, or something, that you’d wipe away the memory when the timelines merged again. Some shit like that. And I held her, and then you...then she was...”

Max lets out an “Oh,” low, barely audible.

“She asked if she was — if you were killing yourself, every time you did this. In some, I don’t know, grand cosmic sense.”

“I—I’ve been thinking about it,” Max admits. “But—it’s over, now. I’m here, with you, and that’s all I care about.”

It’s not all that Chloe cares about. The idea that Max would go through everything for her and her quest for vengeance for a girl that Max had never met, everything that led up to this moment, it all weighs down her mind like a thick tar. She has to struggle through it to even think about what it means when Max leans up, her eyes searching. The taste of her lips is a shock, just like yesterday morning, but she doesn’t pull back this time. She’s stuck in the tar. She tastes rust, and her own tears.

“I love you so much, Chloe,” Max breathes, her arms circling around Chloe as their lips part. “I would do anything.”

“Don’t,” Chloe blurts. “Don’t. Not ever again. No more rewinds, no more...photo-traveling, or whatever the hell you were doing, don’t, don’t, I can’t let you do this for me anymore.”

“Okay.” Max’s head on her shoulder. “Okay.”

“I can’t watch you do that again.”

“Okay.”

“Seriously, Max—”

And now Max is shaking in her arms, and it feels like something’s shifted, like all the tension in Max’s body has suddenly released. Like she has the answer she’d been waiting for since she took over the other Max, and she’s collapsing after holding herself up for way too long. And Chloe feels like an asshole. Again. Like any of her feelings matter, like Max hadn’t suffered exactly what she had, only a hundred times worse. Chloe hadn’t seen Max crippled and begging for death. Chloe hadn’t seen Max shot, bleeding out on a bathroom floor or with her brains splattered all over the junkyard or turned into a red smear by a train. Chloe doesn’t even deserve to have these feelings. She hasn’t earned them. Not the way Max has.

“I am so fucking selfish.”

Max’s hand clutches at the strap of her tank top. “It’s okay,” she murmurs. “It’s over. It’s finally over.” A shuddering sigh of relief escapes her as she falls  further into Chloe’s chest. “You’re right. Never again.”

The tears clear out of Chloe’s eyes, enough for her to finally look down and see the red stains that Max’s nose has left on her top. “Oh, shit, Max,” she says, pushing her off for a second. “You’re a mess.”

Max looks up and sniffs, then wipes her face, which doesn’t really do much good. “Sorry.”

“Come on, let’s...let’s clean you up.” Chloe takes Max by the shoulders and sits her down on the edge of the bed. She quickly grabs a few spare tissues from her desk and wipes the blood off of Max’s face for her. Max seems half-dead again, her fingers twisting in her lap, eyes vacant. Chloe’s chest tightens.

She sets the bloodied tissues on the nightstand and turns back to Max. “Hey, do you...need anything? The—the other you, she didn’t sleep much. I don’t know how that works between you, really...”

“I didn’t sleep much either.” Max meets her eyes. “My head...I’ve been using my powers so much...”

“Then let’s sleep. Mo-move that skinny ass over.” Chloe knows it’s not even really a joke, and she fucked up the delivery, but she needs to do something to lift the mood.

Max’s face lightens just a little bit as she moves to the other side and lets Chloe crawl in beside her. The world seems a little less sticky as Chloe lays down beside Max, like they’re kids again, having a sleepover. Only this time, Chloe actually puts her arm around Max instead of imagining it, or dreaming it. That kiss told her that now, it’s okay, to hold Max like this. To love her like this.

“You’ll be here when I wake up, right?” Max asks, her voice vibrating against Chloe’s arm.

“Why would I go anywhere? This is _my_ house.”

“Chloe...”

Chloe strengthens her grip. “Sorry. Of course. I’m never leaving you, Max. Not even if you want me to.”

Max tightens up at that, and Chloe thinks she might’ve said something wrong, but if she did, Max doesn’t say.

She doesn’t fall asleep until she feels Max relax in her arms, her breath slow. She looks like she’s at peace, even if she’s not. Even if she might never be. The image is all that Chloe’s going to get for now, and she’ll take it, because there is nothing else. Not yet.


	2. Floating

It starts the same day that it ended.

Chloe wakes up (at like fucking two PM or something) to Max’s hand _clenched_ on her shoulder. The first thing she sees are Max’s eyes, wide and staring and her mouth is quivering until she seems to realize that Chloe’s awake and staring right back at her.

“Uh, Max, you okay?”’

Max purses her lips and nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” And then she hugs Chloe, and while it’s nice, it’s kind of terrifying too.

“Max, you’re freaking me out.”

Max just holds tighter.

“Look, if this is supposed to be some symbolic I’ll-never-let-you-go thing, we already did that,” Chloe says, though she puts an arm around Max just the same, rubs her back. “But, like, I have to piss.”

Max laughs, her body shaking against Chloe. She pulls back, and while she doesn’t look _okay_ (her hair’s all fucked up and her eyes are still red and there are dark circles under them), she looks better. A little bit. She’s not smiling, though. She looks distant, faraway. Remembering something that didn’t happen.

“Max, you need a shower.”

Another laugh, a hint of a smile. Good enough for Chloe. For now. She considers teasing, for a moment, _“Or we could both take one,”_ but she bites her lip. She’d been certain last night, that kiss had _meant_ something. But here, as she stares into Max’s eyes, she puts all that aside. If there’s something between them, something more than friendship, it has to wait. Because Max needs her, and Chloe’s love is selfish and brash and it drives people away. She knows that.

If Max went through that hell for her, she has to be better.

 

* * *

 

It seems harmless enough until Chloe breaks the pattern.

Every night, sleeping together. Every morning, Max looking over her, listening to her breathe. Chloe’s willing, at first, to spend every night in Blackwell, being Max’s rock. But then one night, she wakes up before Max. She wakes up in the middle of the night, in fact, an itch in her veins.

God _dammit_.

It's been nice, pretending she can quit that easy. It seems like the least she can do to be worthy of Max’s sacrifices. But as she slips out of Max’s bed, a needle at the back of her head, she decides that just one won’t hurt. And maybe it’ll be a good thing, she thinks, bending over for her jacket on the floor. Half the addiction is the ability to just fuck off for five minutes at any given time and claim it’s dependency, and she could use some time out in the moonlight to get her own thoughts together. She’d kept one pack for just this kind of emergency, which, she realizes, probably means she was expecting to fail. Not a good look.

Still, she pulls the jacket around herself and carefully pushes the door out, propping it with a book that Max left on the floor. Thank God that it's a warm night, because she can’t be bothered to get pants on, not if she’s trying to keep Max asleep. Still, she realizes she would make quite a sight, jacket, tank top, aaand then just boxers, so she tries to speed her way out of the dorm as fast as possible. Luckily, no one’s up. The halls are empty, which is probably reasonable given the time. Whatever time it is. Chloe had refused to look for a clock, because she doesn’t need an exact measure of just how pathetic her enslavement to nicotine is.

As soon as she’s outside, she takes the pack out of her pocket and sticks a cigarette between her teeth. Even the paper feels good in her mouth, God. Cold turkey sucks. One quick light, and as she breathes it in, it feels warm and scratchy in her lungs. She stares up at the moon, then hides it behind a cloud of smoke. Under the porchlight, things seem to make a kind of sense. There’s nothing to complain about out here, with the stars overhead and the silence of the night surrounding her. The space around her feels infinite, full of possibility. She considers the future, how to be better for Max beyond just, well, not doing this stupid shit anymore.

Go back to school, in some way. Maybe even apply for college. Learn to do something, fuckin’ _anything_. She’s had enough of hanging around Arcadia Bay and pissing everyone off. Max will be leaving when the year’s over, probably off to a real college, and Chloe should be ready to go then, too. She can’t be the one dragging her down. She should be able to keep up, to stay with her, no matter what. Without Max there, needing her attention and love, she can finally _think_ for a minute, and it feels good. Tomorrow, she’ll tell Max her plans. Get some support. If there’s one thing that girl can do, it’s make you feel like you can take on the world.

Or, that was something she could do. Before last Friday. Before the Dark Room. Chloe’s thoughts curdle in her brain. Will she be okay, if I’m off doing my own thing? How long is she gonna need me near? She’s functioning, doing her homework, going to classes, but she’s always texting, always worried, always looking at me like I’m gonna disappear. And she’s so _quiet_. Getting her to laugh is a full-time job, these days, and while the reward is sweet and Max’s laughter makes her feel lighter and bolder, it never lasts long. And when she looks down after she laughs, Chloe always wants to kiss her. But she worries about pushing too much, entangling Max in even more worries and fears about their relationship, and then the moment passes, and turns to silence. And every time, it fucking sucks.

The cigarette is nearly burnt down. Chloe isn’t sure how much time she’s spent smoking versus how much she’s spent thinking. It scratched the itch, in any case. Just as she’s about to flick the butt away, the door beside her bursts open and she drops it right onto her bare foot.

“Fuck!”

“Chloe?”

She hops on one foot as she turns to face the door, and finds Max standing there. The porch light glints off a sheen of sweat on her arms. Her chest rises and falls rapidly, her eyes wide and worried and her fingers clenched at her sides.

They stare at each other for a moment. Max slumps back against the door, putting a hand to her forehead and squeezing her eyes shut.

“Sorry,” she whispers as Chloe approaches her. “Sorry, I just—I woke up, and you weren’t—And I thought...I called your phone, and it was on the desk, but still...”

“Hey, Max, it’s cool, I’m here,” Chloe says, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I just...needed a smoke.

“Yeah...yeah, that makes sense.” She’s shivering, hugging herself. “I keep thinking that somehow, I’ll wake up, and you’ll be gone again. I—I dream about it, using my powers, going back to the day all this started, and...”

Chloe puts her hands on Max’s shoulders. “Max. I’m here.”

“I know.” Max leans into her. “I know.”

Chloe wants to kiss her. As if that would make anything better. As if having Chloe Price in your life ever helps at all. She holds her under the stars and thinks of the future. A time when Max will be okay. It feels a long way off.

 

* * *

 

Chloe has to go home at _some_ point, if only to do laundry and put Joyce’s mind at ease. She hasn’t questioned Chloe’s constant absence from the house until recently. Just a text or two, confirming that she and Max were watching out for each other. But it’s been almost a month, and Chloe’s clothes are starting to get a little ripe, and Max has been okay, and she even says that it’s fine if Chloe goes home for a couple of nights. “I’ve kinda been slacking on homework anyway,” she admits as Chloe gets ready to leave. “No offense, but you make it kinda hard to concentrate sometimes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s more fun to hang out with you than seriously attempt homework.”

Chloes knows it’s true, she hasn’t been great for Max’s study habits. They tend to end up together on the bed, watching movies or listening to songs, cuddling. It’s good, it’s always really fucking good, and Chloe’s urge to kiss her has gotten unbearable. And it’s not just that that she has to stay away from. She can’t get high, or drunk, or zone out and listen to music that’s turned up way too loud. She can’t be _Chloe Price_ , Blackwell dropout, troublemaker, punk-rock girl who never gives a shit about anything. It feels suffocating, sometimes, restraining herself, trying to be better for Max, to deserve her. And it’s gotten to the point where, if she thinks about it, she knows she still doesn’t. No matter how much studying she does for a GED, no matter what unhealthy habits she kicks, she’ll never be good enough.

She wants, desperately, to stop thinking.

Joyce greets her with a complaint about her huge bag of laundry, spoken in that Southern way of hers where everything she says actually means, “I love you.” It’s the same trick she uses to turn “Bless your heart” into wishing death on you. But today she’s warm and inviting, probably because Chloe’s been texting her about getting her GED and quitting smoking and all that shit she’s doing to pretend she’s worth something. David’s here too; apparently helping to bust Jefferson put him back in Joyce’s good graces, and Chloe doesn’t feel that automatic revulsion at the sight of him anymore. But as they sit down at the dinner table and talk, half-tense, about nothing in particular, her mind wanders to Max. Max telling her that David saved her from the Dark Room, in another timeline, a worse timeline. And then she thinks of the bottle hidden under her desk upstairs. It stays on her mind the whole time she’s eating, the whole time she’s dodging Joyce’s careful, tactical insinuations that prod at “So are you two girlfriends now or what?” but never actually come out and say it. She’s so smug. Even if Chloe told her about having a crush on her best friend when she was thirteen, it doesn’t give her the right to have that knowing smirk. At least, not when Chloe doesn’t really know what the answer is.

As soon as the dishes start, Chloe is out of there, just like old times. Dodging responsibility is an easy hobby to pick back up. As soon as she’s in her room she dives for the handle of vodka, unscrews the cap, and takes a long, disgusting, painful pull. It burns so bad she can barely believe it, but then she remembers that her throat’s been getting a break over the past couple of weeks compared to the last year of her life, and keeps going until she’s sure another drop will kill her right there. She sets the bottle down hard on the desk and breathes in, feeling the sting on her tongue, in her eyes.

She slumps down at her desk, fingers going to her forehead. She wants the alcohol to work _faster_. She wants to already be blacked-out. To be deep in that pit she’d fallen into after Rachel disappeared. Died. Whatever. Where she didn’t have to deal with anyone and they didn’t have to deal with her.

She can’t occupy her hands with smoking, not with David and Joyce still awake. Instead, she searches through the clutter on her desk and untangles a pair of black earbuds, plugs them into her long-dormant laptop, and turns the volume all the way up. Screaming guitars and screaming women fill her head, drown out her thoughts as she leans back in the chair, closing her eyes, drumming her nails on the desk as the buzz rises from her stomach and crackles through her limbs. She tries to lose herself in it, but she’s watching the clock all the same. Waiting for the house to go dark and quiet so she can break out her pipe. _God_ it feels good, her limbs are loose and uncoordinated and her thoughts are free-form and floating without Max to tether her down, even if they keep going back to Max, over and over. But the images are lighter now; Max in a moshpit, Chloe fending off the worst of it but making sure she still has to fight to stay by her side. Max beside her on a roadtrip, sleeping in the passenger seat while the moon shines on her hair. Max kissing her the morning after they snuck into the Blackwell pool, her hands on Chloe’s shoulders, a smile on her lips.

She barely realizes what she’s doing to herself as the lights of the computer’s visualizer play out across her face. Her fingers trail down her neck as she remembers half-repressed dreams in Max’s bed. She presses, just slightly, like Rachel used to do.

Fucking Rachel.

She snaps out of it, hand slamming down on her keyboard as she remembers Frank’s fucking photos of the girl that was supposed to be hers. Someone she’d suffocated so much with her needy bullshit that she’d needed to go to _Frank Bowers_ for relief. She’d turned that girl into a monster, into Nathan’s victim. She knows she did. She’s seen the Blackwell files. And before she knows it, she’s crying, slumped over her computer with her head in her hands. Fucking stupid. Pathetic. Worthless.

Once she stops shaking, she pulls the earbuds out, listens to the world. Quiet. Joyce and David are in bed. She stands up, walks over to her dresser, finds her pipe and skull-shaped grinder under a mound of old underwear she’s not touched in years. She lifts the top off the skull and finds a surprising amount of fine keef stashed in there. She’d been letting it build up. Good, ‘cuz that joint with Max had basically been the last of her weed, and fucked if she was going to call up Frank right now.

The smoke curling through her lungs slows her heartbeat, lets her relax, even if she does need to blow it through the box fan in her window (just in case). As she sets the dead pipe down and closes her eyes, her thoughts wander back to Max. Feeling their thighs touch at night as they settle into each other. The taste of her lips. The smell of her no-frills deodorant mixed with earth after she tended to Lisa’s soil. Chloe feels too restricted.

She pulls off her top, then her bra. And then her jeans. She lays down on her bed, a dizzy heat flooding her system as she runs a hand over a pierced nipple, imagining Max’s mouth on it, tongue shifting the bar. She tries not to think consciously of what she’s doing. That would ruin it. She lets the flow of images pass through her twice-fogged brain, obeys the needs her body tells her it has. Reaches beneath the waistband of her boxers. She wants to moan Max’s name, really get into it, really _let go_ —

She jumps a foot into the air when her phone rings on the nightstand. She pulls her hands back, covers herself instinctively, shame and disgust washing over her. She knows who’s calling. She’s been falling through the night, barely sure of time, but she knows it’s too late to be anyone but Max.

She scrambles for her phone and unlocks it and answers it as quickly as her clumsy fingers will let her. She’s so glad that Max can’t see the wet smear she leaves on the screen as she lifts the phone to her ear.

“Uh, h-hey, Max, what’s up?”

Heavy breathing on the other end of the line. Lips smacking. Chloe can imagine her face now, sick with worry, like so many mornings. She wants to say something to calm her down, but her mind is a blank space filled with fear and embarrassment and there aren’t any words coming out of the phone and _god dammit, Price._

“Chloe,” finally comes through. “I-I’m sorry, it’s just—you know what it is. God, this is sad. I’m just gonna—”

“No no no Max, don’t hang up,” Chloe blurts out. “T-tell me about your dream, or shomething.” _Shit_ , she definitely slurred that. “L-like, maybe it’ll make you feel better if you just _talk_.”

“It’s the same thing, it’s always the same thing.” Max’s voice rises with the repetition. “God, Chloe, I’m sorry, I’m always doing this to you, I can’t just keep my fucking issues to myself.”

“Max, shut up, it’s my fault, okay? If I hadn’t been a total fucking dipshit and went after Nathan in that bathroom, God or what the fuck ever wouldn’t have reached down and given you those powers to save me,” Chloe insists, sitting up, tears stinging at her eyes. “Fuck, maybe it woulda been better if I died right there instead of dragging you through that whole week.”

“Chloe—”

“Nathan woulda got arrested, and he’dve cracked like a fuckin’ egg, and then Jefferson would get arrested, and Kate wouldn’t have tried to jump, and I could just be dead in real life instead of always dying over and over in your dreams and fucking you up and—”

She can hear Max sobbing on the other end as she says, “I couldn’t have lived with myself if you died in there, I would always be thinking that I could’ve saved you, God, Chloe, don’t _say_ shit like this—”

“—conning you into loving me, like I’m worth anything, Max, God, just forget about me, all right, just go and have a good life and leave your stupid burnout friend behind like everyone else did and I’ll disappear like I’m supposed to—”

Chloe stops herself mid-sentence, hearing Max’s sniffles and slumping down and putting her hand over her burning eyes. And now she’s crying too.

“Is-is that really what you think you are, Chloe?” Max manages through her tears.

“I don’t deserve you,” Chloe mumbles. “I never did.”

And she hangs up. And turns off the phone. And falls into her pillow. And tries to not exist.


	3. Drowning

The first two rocks don’t wake her up, _tinking_ uselessly against the glass. The third does, because it’s just small enough and aimed just right to slip between the slots in the fan. Chloe stirs to the buzzing, and then jolts when the fan vibrates off the shelf, bounces off the trash can, and starts grinding into the floor. With a groan, she crawls across her bed and hangs off the edge, fingers groping for the switch to stop that _horrible_ noise. Once it’s off, she breathes a sigh of relief, her head touching the carpet for a second as the reverberations in her mind fade away. Only after a moment of reflection does she think, _Why the fuck did that just happen?_

She slides face-first off the bed, then slowly gets on her hands and knees and pads over to the desk. She lifts herself up using the edge of it and peers out the window.

And there’s Max, just barely visible under the streetlamp. She’s blurry, but she looks _pissed._

Chloe darts back down behind the desk and crosses her arms over her bare chest, the word _shit_ repeating itself in her mind until another pebble sails into the room and impacts the wall behind her. _She is not going away_ , Chloe knows. _Well, this is fucking rich._

How did she even _get_ here?

Another rock flies through the open window and knocks the empty beer bottle off the sill, so Chloe struggles to her feet and waves at Max with one hand, keeping herself covered with the other. Max has another rock in her hand already, and she looks about ready to throw it, so Chloe points to the front door and splays out her fingers and hopes that Max gets that that means “I’m coming.”

She falls back to the floor and searches blindly for her t-shirt, finding it at the base of her bed. She puts it on, stands up, nearly falls back down again. The dizziness wasn’t so noticeable when at least half of her body was on the ground. The headache still hurts like a bitch, though.

She braces herself against the walls on the way downstairs, trying to keep her footsteps as light as possible on the stairs themselves. She thanks God as she steps onto the hardwood that she’s barefoot, because even without socks she feels like she’s about to slide into the door instead of opening it. At least she can’t fuck up the deadbolt. As soon as it’s undone, Max grabs the door from the other side and pushes in, sending Chloe stumbling backward down the hall.

 _Man, this is not ideal_.

“We need to talk,” Max hisses under her breath, closing the door behind her. “Now.”

“Now?” Chloe asks, pointing upstairs. “Really?”

Max nods, her eyebrows furrowed in anger. Chloe wilts. Max points behind her, out the back door. “Out there.”

“J-just a sec.”

“If you lock the door behind me I am gonna scream _so loud—_ ”

“Just need a drink, sweartoGodMax gimme a break.” It’s true, this whispering hurts like crazy on her dry throat, and maybe a drink would calm down the headache, too.

“Water.”

“Yeah, water.”

Max pushes past her, giving her an angry glare as she makes her way to the backyard. Chloe lets loose a sigh and moves to the kitchen, very carefully selecting a glass from the cupboard in the hopes that she will not send a bunch of glassware tumbling out onto the floor. She doesn’t, and she fills it with tapwater and chugs it all down in one gulp. She can feel it spreading through her veins as she gasps for air, leaning over the sink. She pushes her hair off her forehead. Okay. Time to deal with Angry Max, which sounds fucking terrifying.

Oh, shit, did she _walk_ here from Blackwell? How long does that take, like, an hour and a half? Shit. She must be _really_ pissed.

She considers locking the door behind Max anyway, but she knows Max isn’t bluffing, and increasing her anger level seems like a one-way ticket to Shitshow City, so she meekly goes outside sits next to her in the other lawn chair. She didn’t check the time, but the sky is still dark, so that’s good. Maybe.

She waits for Max to talk, this time. She’s shaking in her chair, some of the anger gone from her face but it’s still there, mixed with something else. Chloe hasn’t seen her this animated since Hell Week.

“You scared the shit out of me, Chloe,” she says, finally. Chloe doesn’t know what to say to that. Not exactly what she expected, but it’s hard to remember whatever she said before she hung up on Max. It’s all a vague blur of tears and self-hatred.

“I thought you were going to kill yourself.”

Chloe jumps in her chair. “I _—_ Max, I, uh _—_ ”

“You sounded a lot like Kate.”

“Shit, Max, I’m _—_ ”

“And I know you’ve tried before.”

Chloe’s heart pounds in her chest as she remembers. Rachel’s quiet words on the other end of a phone line as the barrel of David’s gun rattled against her skull.

“I called Joyce. I yelled at her to check on you, make sure you were okay, that you weren’t doing something stupid. She found you passed-out drunk on your bed, and then you started shouting at each other _—_ ”

“Wait, what?” Chloe’s memory might be foggy, but that definitely didn’t happen.

“I rewound the call, idiot.”

Chloe’s blood runs cold. “No, Max, you’re not supposed to _—_ Your powers _—_ ”

“Then don’t scare the shit out of me.”

“You coulda just let her _—_ ”

“That wouldn’t help you. The last thing you need is for your family life to turn back into shit.”

“Why do you even care what I need?” Chloe pleads, a lump rising in the back of her throat.

Max’s voice softens, and she leans over her chair, puts a hand on Chloe’s arm. “Why do you think?”

“I don’t get it, Max. I...” Stop it. Stop sniffling like a pussy. Stop looking at her eyes. Stop loving her so much that it hurts your chest.

“What you said...is that really what you think? That you conned me into loving you?” Max asks.

“O-of course I did,” Chloe says, wiping her nose. “Ever since you came back, I was just _—_ holding hands, walking a train track, sneaking around Blackwell at night with you, daring you to kiss me, I was just, I was just tricking you into thinking I’m worth a shit.”

“Chloe, you _—_ ”

“If we actually _—_ you’d get tired of me, couple months down the line, once you saw what I really am. Everyone does, eventually. You did, when you left the first time.”

“Oh, Chloe.” God, her voice. There’s so much love in there. It has to turn sour soon. “Right now, I’m seeing you drunk, high, and miserable, and I still love you.”

“Well, Rachel saw me like that too, and she still fucked Frank. It just takes some time.”

Max’s fingers clench on Chloe’s wrist. “Chloe, you can’t blame yourself for that.”

“Yeah? Well, I do. If I’d been better, she wouldn’t have gotten involved with him, or gotten on Nathan’s hitlist, because she would’ve stayed a perfectly normal girl _—_ ”

“Chloe!”

Chloe wrenches her hand out of Max’s grasp, stands up, faces away. Max’s hand is on her shoulder in a minute.

“Chloe, you can’t _—_ you can’t be responsible for her choices. Or Nathan’s. Or Jefferson’s.”

“But I am.” Chloe swallows. “I was trying to be better, for you. I _was_. But I always knew I’d end up back here. Dead weight in my parents’ house, blitzed out of my mind. It’s where I’m always gonna end up, until I fuck up and get alcohol poisoning or something. Or crash my car.”

“That’s not true.”

“Of course it is.”

Max’s arms circle around her waist and she wants to cry. “No, it’s not, I’ve seen it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I fucking know. Good to know the only thing keeping me a total fuckup is the fact that I can move my own body.”

“Chloe _—_ ”

“Oh, wait, I was still a huge burden on my parents. And I still wanted to kill myself!”

Max’s head presses into her neck, leaving wet spots as she trembles and lets out awful, high-pitched noises.

“You can’t fix me, Max, not with all the time-travel bullshit in the world. And I can’t fix myself. I’ll just ruin you.”

“I don’t want to fix you,” Max mumbles into her back.

“Bullshit.”

“No, Chloe, I mean it,” she says, squeezing tight. “I’m not _—_ I’m not looking for some ideal, perfect version of Chloe Price. I don’t even know what that _looks_ like. I just want you. Alive, and, and whole. God, Chloe, so you’re not perfect. Neither am I.”

“Max, you’re a fucking saint, you’re _—_ ”

“Ever since we’ve met back up I’ve had literal magical powers that I can use to fix my stupid choices. You don’t have that.” Max sniffs. “Chloe, you have no idea how many times I fucked up that week. You never, ever will. And I got to see a lot of sides of you, too. And I still want you.”

Chloe turns around, looks her in the eye. “Max, you can’t...”

“You can’t be responsible for my choices, either.” She lifts a hand to Chloe’s face, tucks a stray hair behind her ear. “So do you want to be with me?”

Chloe gulps. “Yes. So much. But _—_ ”

“Then let me decide if you’re going to ruin me.”

Chloe wants to say _no, it’ll hurt too much, when you leave, you’re going to leave, I can’t feel that again_ , but Max’s lips don’t let her. Her nails dig into Chloe’s back. Chloe can’t help it this time, there’s too much alcohol and weed and emotion running through her, so she kisses back, and it feels so fucking good. There’s the final checkmark on the list of _Things I Shouldn’t Do But Really Want To_ that she’s been filling since she took that pull of vodka hours ago. She feels disgusting but she can’t help it, she claws at the back of Max’s head, grabs a handful of hair, pulls her as close as she can be.

It’s Max who finally pulls apart, wipes a tear from Chloe’s face. “You don’t have to be perfect,” she repeats as Chloe opens her mouth. “Okay? I can deal with it. If you need something, tell me. If you want time alone, I’ll leave you alone. But don’t try to be perfect, and don’t just give up, either.”

Her voice is so beautiful. Tired, but firm, and loving, and saying just the right things, like always. Chloe hears the objections rising in her mind, the same ones she’s been screaming to herself for a month, and whispering to Max for the last however-long. She stamps them down. For tonight. She nods, swallows the lump in her throat, and forces out an, “Okay.” Okay, I’ll give it a shot. Okay, I could get hurt again. Okay, because if it’s even remotely possible that Max could really love her forever, would really never leave her, like she promised, it’s worth the risk.

Max hugs her again, and Chloe rests her head on top of hers, running her fingers through her hair. The sky is a light blue, tinged with faint hints of orange. The stars still dimly shine through thin, pink clouds. The moon is a pale gray dot near the horizon. Arcadia Bay, shithole that it is, can still be beautiful, in the right light, at the right time.

“I am not walking back to Blackwell,” Max says into her neck.

Chloe laughs, so hard she can barely believe it. She feels hysterical, and Max even gives her a look that says she definitely is, but she doesn’t care. The air is light, the world is quiet, except for the half-sobbing crazed noises she’s putting into it. Max kisses her again, probably to shut her up, and that just makes her crazier. When they pull apart, Chloe’s able to keep it in, her chest just jumping under her shirt with suppressed giggles. Her lips quiver in a half-smile. Relief is weird, but it is overpowering, and she lets it flow through her. She clings to Max. It’s like she took three points of molly, except her teeth aren’t grinding. It’s like Rachel’s hand on her neck. It’s like love.

“I love you,” Chloe says quietly, into Max’s messy hair.

She feels Max’s smile against her skin, as wide and crazed as her own. “We need to get some fucking sleep,” is her reply.

“You are so right.” Chloe can feel the exhaustion in her bones, even through the euphoria. She knows how this goes; if you try to make it through the day after a night this rough/wonderful, you crash like a freight train on your girlfriend’s shoulder and drool all over her. She wants to stay up, to keep feeling this way, but Max tugs at her hand, slides the door to the house open. She lets Max lead her through the hall, a little surer on her feet than before. She feels Max freeze before she sees why.

Joyce stands at the top of the stairs, looking bemused. After a pause, a soft, knowing, smug-ass smile comes to her lips, and she stands aside. “After you.”

Max gives a sheepish smile back and guides Chloe up the stairs. Chloe meets Joyce’s eyes as they pass by, and Joyce gives her a wink.

Moms, man.

Once they get into Chloe’s room, she shuts the door behind her and leans against it, sighing.

“You are gonna have so much explaining to do,” Max teases.

“Don’t you try and weasel out of this,” Chloes warns. “We’re doing it together.”

“I don’t know if I can take Joyce’s full-on Southern smuggitude,” Max says as she pulls off her hoodie.

“You’re not leaving me alone to deal with it. You started this.” Chloe lets herself stare as Max pulls off her jeans.

Max smiles. “Yeah. I did. And you went along with it.”

“Don’t gloat, hippie.”

Max steps up to her and gives her a light kiss. Chloe stands up and pushes back and gives her a much, much heavier one, pushing her down against the bed. Max’s lips aren’t as confident, as experienced, and her tongue feels nervous in Chloe’s mouth, but God. It’s so good. Chloe starts to lift up Max’s shirt, but Max gently grabs her wrists and pulls back. Her “No,” should feel like a rejection, but it doesn’t because it’s soft and quiet and carries this tone of “Not _yet_ ” and Chloe didn’t really want to, anyway. Her body did, her hands did, but she knows, as she stands up and stares down at Max, that this can’t be their first time. Not after that shitshow of a night. It has to be perfect. It will be perfect.

She just nods and crawls into bed beside her, her limbs growing weak and heavy the instant she touches the sheets. And that. Tired sex can be good sex, but not first time, and again, not after all _that_. It’s like she can remember what she did to her body as she curls up, noticing the pounding in her head again, the ache in her throat, the stinging in her eyes. This time, it’s Max who’s behind her, wrapping her arms around her. Chloe wants to cry, and she doesn’t really get why. But as the light grows and they settle into each other, she starts to think again.

Max needs her, sure. That was why Chloe was tearing herself apart in guilt, after all. Max needs someone to be there for her, to support her so she can keep doing amazing things. But Chloe needs Max, too. It feels so blindingly obvious that she wonders how she thought she was alone when she always had Max. How she thought she had to stand on her own, and not lean into the girl who’d saved her life. As if love is just killing yourself to prop someone up while they happily ignore you.

 _You are such a goddamned idiot, Price,_ is her last thought before she falls into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In memory of long talks with fuzzy minds and honest hearts, on balconies under early morning light.


	4. Surface Tension

Things are okay.

She knows that when she wakes up alone. Max isn’t staring at her, clinging to her like she’ll float away. Max is downstairs, judging from the sounds of soft conversation drifting under her door. She’s talking to Joyce. The sun shines brightly through her window and stabs at her dehydrated face, but hangovers end. Things always come back to stability, until they don’t, and then they do again.

All the words of last night tumble through her head. A lot of it she still believes, still prickles in her heart. That’s fine. That’s normal, for Chloe. Has been for a long time. The mind is where reality goes to turn into bullshit. She knows that she’ll take the worst possible interpretation sometimes. It frustrates other people. Frustrates David, Joyce, and Max. But sometimes it is the right way to look at things, and she can get shit done. Like when she and Max decided to take on the Bay and track down a killer. As much bad as had happened in that week, as terrible as the secrets they uncovered were, they saved at least one life together.

And try as it might, right now, her head can’t turn last night into a bad thing. It adds whispers of dark potential futures, where Max leaves, where she grows to hate Chloe, where all the things she always suspects about herself really are true. But the fact is, they were happy when they went to sleep. And even if things go to shit later, for now they’re okay.

Maybe grasping for those moments and keeping them is enough.

She doesn’t really want to get up. The bed’s comfortable, and Max will probably come back soon. She wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. To Max, Chloe’s not just some clingy punk chick, good for a quick fuck and a quicker leap out the door. To Max, she matters.

It’s the smell that eventually convinces her to act like a human being again. Joyce can’t cook anything without six tons of grease, and it makes the house home when the scent of fried food is drifting through it. That hasn’t changed since Dad died. Chloe never appreciates it enough.

She rummages through her closet and finds a pair of old pajama pants. Good enough for the...breakfast table? Lunch table? The food-place. She slowly pushes her door out, careful not to make too much noise. She wants to hear them.

“...well, you know, you’re always welcome in our home, Max.”

“I do know. Sorry if we woke you up.”

“It’s no trouble. I could tell she wasn’t doing well the minute she came home. I’m glad you came along.” There’s a pregnant pause. “I can’t help her, when she gets like that. She won’t let me. She needs someone like you, someone young and kind and patient as all hell. I know she doesn’t make it easy.”

Chloe creeps forward and takes a seat on the top stair, rests her elbows on her knees.

“She’s had it rough.”

“She has. We all have. I’m not as patient as you, Max, I’ll come out and admit it. I always seem to think that yelling at her will work, in the moment. We both know it doesn’t help anything, but...”

“Our conversation didn’t start out that great either, Joyce.”

“The difference is, she was smiling when you two came up the stairs.”

Chloe hides her head in her hands. Fuck, this is embarrassing. They are too goddamn honest with each other. It’s unnatural.

“Max, I have to ask...”

Chloe hears the sound of Max nearly spitting out a faceful of food and covers her mouth to keep from laughing at the image.

“Ask-ask what?”

“It’s just...ever since you came back, you and Chloe have been real close. Close enough that she spent three weeks with you at Blackwell. In a room with one bed.”

“You’re as sharp as your daughter, Joyce.” Chloe hears the cute little waver in her voice. She loves it when Max tries to be confident. And then she figures where the conversation is going, and realizes that Max is gonna do it without her, the little snake.

Joyce chuckles. “Well. Treat her right, you hear? Y’already are, I haven’t heard of her studying in years, but still.” And then a pause. And, “You can come down now, Chloe.”

Of fucking course.

Chloe leaps up and pounds down the stairs, marching right up to a pair of smirks sitting at the dining room table. Max looks away, her grin growing over her plate of fried chicken. “You were talking about me,” Chloe accuses.

“That’s right, we were.” Joyce leans back in her chair. “There’s a plate for you in the kitchen. Figured we were gonna wake you up once we were done chattin’.”

“Uh huh. Got any more private things about me you wanna tell her, Max?” Chloe asks as she pads through the kitchen, grabbing her glass from last night and filling it with water again.

“Please, Chloe. Like you were ever in the closet.” Joyce’s voice is so warm it physically induces Chloe’s gag reflex. Or maybe that’s the hangover. Whatever.

“Sorry. She asked,” Max adds while Chloe gulps down the entire glass, and then a second. Jesus, her throat’s parched. Why the hell does she ever want to drink?

“I really am happy for you both,” Joyce says as Chloe locates her plate and turns around. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have dating my daughter.”

Chloe wants to object, spout some sarcastic comment at her, throw the compliment off. Something like “She’s only dating me to get close to you, obviously.”  But then she catches Max’s eye, and her soft smile. The way she looks so content to be hearing this. Like she’s waited forever to call Chloe her girlfriend and listen to Joyce’s approval.

And things are okay.

 

* * *

 

They aren’t perfect, like Max said.

Max’s room at Blackwell is small and cramped and she has to do her own laundry if she wants to stay there. But dammit, she really does. Having a space that belongs to just her and Max feels essential, no parents to watch out for, just them, as late into the night as they want. Her truck collects dust in the parking lot. The junkyard and Frank’s RV don’t seem necessary anymore. And she can get cigs and weed from the Blackwell kids pretty easy, without having to leave campus and face down the biggest loser in Arcadia Bay.

But getting back into seriously studying is _hard_ _._ She hasn’t done it since she was thirteen, and every book she checks out from the library, every minute spent staring at the screen, every pre-test she does (and fails) itches. When she gets too frustrated, when there’s too much goddamn stupid shit to remember, she goes out and has a smoke. She tries to keep it to once or twice a day, for Max’s sake. But when she’s out there, things knit together in her head. Stuff kind of makes sense, and when she goes back in, it’s a little easier to keep things straight. Or maybe it’s just feeding her nicotine addiction and leaving withdrawal that helps. That thought itches, too.

She’s glad that David’s head of security here sometimes. He won’t kick her out like he’s probably supposed to if some bum sets up shop in the dorms without going to school. They don’t talk to each other, but Joyce tells her over the phone that David’s gotten used to the idea of Chloe and Max keeping each other out of trouble, and so long as that appears to be what’s actually happening, they’ll face no judgement.

The people around the dorm start to get used to her. For a while, she’s a recluse like she was after Hell Week, just hanging out in Max’s dorm and sneaking around when everyone’s asleep. But now, well, she’s _doing_ shit during the day, and sometimes she wants to not be, so she hangs out. She likes Dana and Juliet. They end up talking a fair amount out in the quad, Chloe inviting herself into their conversations when she hears an interesting nugget. The first time she does it, they look a little shocked, but they welcome the new viewpoint. And then it just turns into a thing. Chloe can show up, shoot the shit, and leave. Easy. Alyssa and Stella keep their distance at first. Whispers about “Max’s crazy girlfriend” keep them, and others, a little bit at bay. Kate’s the most weird about it, for a while. She drops her books the first time she sees her in person, and Chloe, who’s just coming in from a smoke break, picks them up for her. Kate’s thank-you is quiet and meek. But before she heads into her room, she gives Chloe a sudden, hard look, and says, “Don’t hurt her.”

She likes Kate, too.

Warren comes by occasionally. He seems cool with the whole thing, like he accepted it back in October despite how obviously he was in love with Max. Chloe does not feel threatened by the little man. He’s kind of funny, when he doesn’t let himself get into the self-pity thing. He’s a bit tryhard and a bit too eager to please, still, but that’s not such a bad thing, and he’s got a killer movie collection. Sometimes, he’s a little like William, all dumb dad jokes and over-delivery, and it’s a comforting kind of dorkitude. Double-movie-dates with him and Brooke in the dorms turn into a weekly thing. It’s nice. Chloe fits in there, in some strange way, among the nerds and the outcasts. She and Brooke can heckle, Warren and Max can geek out and get defensive and argue about the merits of this, that, and the other thing. Brooke's better for Warren than Max would be, Chloe decides. She keeps him straight. Doesn’t take any shit. A good trait in any girl, and Warren could use some restraint.

Victoria, Courtney, Taylor, what the hell ever. Vic will never get how Max and Chloe saved her life, or if she does, she doesn’t show it. She’s not as bitchy as Max’s diary remembers, but she and her posse are cold towards Chloe, whisper names behind her back. Once, she finds DYKE written on the door to Max’s room, and she gets a pretty firm impression of who did it.

So maybe she breaks into Vic’s room and trashes half her expensive shit. She knows what that was. Testing the waters. Seeing if she’d take it lying down. Well, mess with Chloe Price or her girlfriend and get it back three times worse.

Like Max said. Not perfect. But Vic and her cronies don't say a word to or about Chloe ever again. They stay in their lane.

When Max finds out what she did, she’s not super happy. Rumors make their way through the grapevine in this school. Chloe promises to tone down the protectiveness. She’s not sure if she’s lying, really. She’ll _try_ , but man. The thought of people hurting Max is always gonna provoke a reaction.

She really does try, in a lot of ways, to be better for Max. But the thoughts still needle at her. Telling her that Max is way too good for her, that all she deserves is a cheating, dishonest slut like Rachel or a dangerous, entitled creep like Nathan. Telling her that by all rights, she shouldn’t be alive, that God himself had to come down and grant Max powers to prevent her own dumb mistakes from killing her. Telling her that she’s dragging Max down, dragging down everyone she meets. When they get too bad, she can’t help it, she reaches for a bottle. But she just takes one shot to calm her nerves, instead of ten to try and blank them out. It takes the edge off long enough for the other side of Chloe’s brain to take over. But things aren’t perfect.

She likes Kate. She likes Max. She likes the idea that Max can be normal and have her own friends and do her own thing without her. But still. When they go out for a tea date, the first in way too long according to Max, Chloe stays in Max’s room and just kind of stews. She smokes a little weed. A lot, actually, because it’s supposed to calm you down. It’s supposed to _not_ convince you that your girlfriend is gonna leave you because of some bible-thumping pretty-girl who probably thinks you’re a bad influence on the angel who saved her from suicide. But maybe that’s just her head. Or maybe it’s not. Or maybe Kate just wants Max all to herself. She could be hiding something behind that God-loving exterior, a forbidden desire, a dirty little secret. And why not? Kate and Max would go better together, anyway. They’re both kind, and sweet, and a little shy, and they’re good kids. They’d make a cute pair. Maybe if Chloe was out of the picture, they would.

Max finds her on the floor when she comes back, waving one hand in front of her face, the other holding a still-smoking pipe. The sun’s setting in the window, giving her fingers long shadows through the smoke, thick in the air.

“Jesus Christ, Chloe,” Max sighs, walking over to the window and opening it up. The cold winter air invades Chloe’s space. “You’re gonna suffocate Lisa.”

“Sorry.” Chloe’s still watching her own fingers, feeling them thread through her thoughts. Like flipping pages in a diary she’d been writing as she waited for Max to get home. She took longer than she said she would.

“Hey, Chloe.” Max sits down next to her head, crosses her legs. “You doing okay?”

“Why do you even like me, Max?”

Max runs her fingers through Chloe’s hair, combing it back from her forehead. “Do I have to have just one reason?”

“Your friends are all so much nicer than me. And they’re prettier. So much more like you. Why wouldn’t you...”

“Chloe, are you jealous of Kate? Is that what I’m hearing?”

Chloe rolls over, away from her. “N-not exactly, but I mean, she’d be better for you. I-I’m not accusing you of anything, just...”

“You know pretty much all we talked about was you. You’re the biggest thing to come up since we last sat down and talked.”

“So, what, did she try to tell you that I’m a whore and that you shouldn’t be with girls or—”

“She was worried about me. She didn’t know anything about you. She asked me the same question you just did.” Max’s hand rubs her shoulder. “I had a lot to say. I said she’s smart. No, shut up, you are. I don’t mean school-smart. I mean she can cut right to the heart of a problem faster than anyone I know, and that means she can cut through bullshit, too. Even if I don’t like her solutions, they usually do work.” Chloe shivers at Max’s soft tone. The way she talks _is_ angelic. “And she makes me feel like I can take on the world and win. Because we kind of did.”

“And...” Max tugs at her shoulder, wanting to look at her, and Chloe doesn’t resist, staring up into those blue eyes. “And she has so much love to give. I didn’t tell her the next part, but...” Her hand trails down Chloe’s cheek. “I can forget the Dark Room, when I’m with her. Even when I wake up from my nightmares, if she’s near, I know that it’s not really happening. I know because the way she looks at me, the way she touches me, has more love in it than could ever exist down there.” She shifts herself, putting her arms on either side of Chloe, setting the pipe aside. “I just wish she could give some of it to herself.”

“I don’t deserve you,” Chloe whispers, her hands traveling to Max’s waist.

“You so absolutely do.”

Max is so light on top of Chloe, so small, but her lips are so soft. Her kiss repeats everything that she said. Chloe would question everything Max told her, but the way this feels, she knows Max believes every word. And maybe if she believes this hard, she’s right. Max is always right.

After what feels like a hundred soft, slow, perfect Max kisses, Chloe’s back starts to ache, and Max lifts herself off. As she gets to her feet, she offers Chloe a hand. “I think we need to go on an adventure,” she says. “You’ve gotta get outta here.”

Chloe nods dumbly. “...have been feeling kinda cooped up,” she admits.

“So have I, honestly.” Max steps past her and takes William’s camera off her desk. Chloe looks to the wall where Max’s photos had been, that she’d had to trash because of Nathan’s stupid vandalism. She hasn’t filled it back up yet. Chloe hasn’t asked, thinks it’s memories of Jefferson holding her back. She still takes the camera from time to time, but it’s always for class.

“S-so, what you really mean is, I’m gonna follow you around while you take pictures,” Chloe attempts.

“You’re gonna lead _me_ around, thank you. I’m sure you know some places in this town worth my eye.” Max stashes the camera in her bag.

“You grew up here too, Caulfield.”

“Yeah, but you’ve been roaming for years. Show me what you’ve seen.”

As Max starts to head out the door, Chloe reaches into her pocket and pulls out her wallet. She unfolds the picture hidden in one of its pockets. A blue butterfly, perched on a bucket, Max’s face reflected in the metal. She takes a pin from Max’s desk and sticks it through the photo, then puts it right in the center of the wall.

Max turns back, waiting for her to follow, and freezes in the doorway. Chloe looks to her, then to the photo, then back. She shakes, a little bit. This is okay, right? Like, it’s not a happy memory, but it’s where they met back up again. It’s the start of everything good that’s happened to Chloe in a long time. She tries to say all this with her eyes, because her mouth would fumble it and make it sound stupid.

Max finally says something, looking down at her feet. “You, uh, you kept that?”

“...yeah. Of course. Should I...”

“No. Leave it.” Max looks up and tucks a stray hair behind her ear. “God, Chloe, you’re more romantic than you think sometimes.”

“Stop saying nice things about me, Caulfield, they’ll go to my head.”

“That’s the idea,” Max says quietly, taking her by the hand. “Come on. Let’s get out in that snow.”


	5. Breathing Free

It always goes like this.

The only light in the room is Max’s laptop, shining faint blue on their bodies on the bed as they fumble. Max is under her, sitting up against the wall, whimpering as their tongues meet, slide over each other, hot and wet and delicious. Every sound she makes makes Chloe want her more. Makes her hands clutch at her clothes, grab handfuls of hair, pumps heat through her body. But then they stop for a moment, a trail of spit between their lips. Max’s mouth hangs just slightly open, her eyes almost black, her hands on Chloe’s hips. Heavy breathing fills the air.

She’s too beautiful. Always. The thought of Chloe’s rough hands on her starts to feel wrong, unearned. Chloe’s desire burns in her gut, but she can’t indulge it, like she can’t indulge an urge to drink herself dead. So she slumps down and lays her head on Max’s chest, waiting to calm down. Max’s heartbeat pounds against her ear.

“Chloe,” Max whispers, sending shivers down Chloe’s spine. Her fingers fit under Chloe’s chin, lift her lips to Max’s again. Max’s kiss is hard, demanding, so much so that Chloe has to break away or...

“Chloe.” A hint of irritation in her voice as she presses on the back of Chloe’s neck. Chloe shudders and lays back down on Max. She doesn’t know what she wants. She can’t want _me_ , not like that. Chloe feels sick. Disgusting.

Max relaxes against the wall and strokes Chloe’s hair with a sigh. Chloe hears her heartbeat slow. “Is something...wrong?” she murmurs.

Chloe shakes her head and mumbles an “Mm-mm” into Max’s chest. She knows Max hates the pity-party. She knows that Max thinks she wants more from her, but it’s a trick. Just like how this whole thing started. Max should have someone better than her. Someone nicer. But Max has made it clear that she doesn’t believe that, even if Chloe can’t help thinking it every time this happens.

Max doesn’t seem convinced. “Then...why’d you stop?”

“I don’t know,” Chloe lies.

Max shifts underneath her, her legs rising up, so Chloe rolls off of her and buries her face in the pillow. Max crawls over her and stands up. Chloe kind of wants to disappear.

“Is...is it because I said no, that one time?”

Chloe shakes her head. God, does she have to talk about it? Can’t she just assume Chloe’s not in the mood instead of being so damned right? Not that it’s because of that ‘no’, but something is wrong. Ever since that morning, she hasn’t been able to ignore the warning bells that go off when she starts wanting Max. All of Max. She’s not euphoric enough, not tired and half-wasted enough, to just go for it and give it a shot again. Her brain’s too talkative.

She feels Max sit down on the edge of the bed. A hand shakes her shoulder. “Hey. Come on.”

Chloe rolls over and sees Max holding her pipe, a half-burnt bowl still loaded. Chloe screws up her face. “Huh?”

“You’re really tense. I thought you might wanna relax.” Chloe can barely see Max’s face, but it’s got a weird expression on. Like a smile, only not.

“Caulfield, are you trying to loosen me up?” she asks.

“Fine, if you won’t, I will,” Max says with a shrug, bringing the pipe to her lips and lifting the lighter in her other hand.

Chloe scrambles behind her, trying to grab for the pipe. “What the fuck, Max, you do not smoke weed,” she insists as Max carefully dodges her hands.

“I could, if I wanted to. Kinda want to.”

Chloe sits up and scoots next to her. “What is this about, Max?”

“It’s just...” Max sighs again, letting the paraphernalia fall into her lap. “The way you looked at me. Like I was blinding you, or something. Like I’m too perfect or pure or whatever for you to...”

Max has gotten really fucking good at guessing Chloe’s thought patterns. Hiding shit from her is near-impossible. Which probably means she’s a great girlfriend, but what a pain in the ass.

“Sometimes, I feel like when you’re looking at me, you’re seeing, like, some perfect version of Max. Not really me.” Max looks down at her hands. “I don’t know, I thought, if I showed you that maybe I’d like to let go for a change...”

Chloe’s mouth goes dry. She’s thought about offering Max some before. Fantasized, more like. But she didn’t, for the same reason she can’t bring herself to really go after Max. It would be corrupting her, the cute little hipster girl that she loves so much. Turning her into Chloe, her dark mirror, the dropout, the loser.

“You’re usually so giggly and cuddly when you’re high,” Max continues. “I...I don’t know. It seems like fun.”

Chloe thinks about the way Max looked at her back there, the need in her voice, the little noises she makes when they’re kissing. Maybe she’s right. Maybe Max contains multitudes and it’s stupid to treat her like this, but when Chloe thinks of her powers, her sacrifices, it’s hard to believe that.

Maybe the trick is to stop thinking so much.

Chloe says, “Are you sure?” Max nods. “All right. But I’m going first.”

Max hands over the pipe and lighter, and Chloe takes a quick hit. She holds the smoke in her mouth and leans over, taking Max’s chin. As they kiss, Chloe feels Max inhale.

As they break apart, Max lets out a little cough. “You good?” Chloe asks.

Max nods vigorously. “Do it again.”

The second time, Max lets out a little moan, and everything feels lighter. Less serious. Max seems to think so too, giggling to herself as they break apart. She crosses her foot over Chloe’s and leans into her, waiting patiently for the next hit.

By the time the bowl is dead, Max is on her lap, and they’re just kissing now, the pipe and lighter beside Chloe on the bed. Max takes a minute to burrow her head into Chloe’s shoulder, sighing happily, her body loose and pliant in Chloe’s arms. When Chloe looks down at her, it’s not a bunch of worshipful nonsense in her head. It’s _lightweight._ It’s _cute little nerd._ It’s _my dorky girlfriend_. And now her dorky girlfriend is drawing little designs on her chest with her finger.

“It drives me crazy when you go around with no bra on,” Max whispers with a toothy smile.

“Crazy good or crazy bad?”

“Crazy crazy.” Max laughs at herself. “I can always see your piercings...”

Max’s finger brushes one, shifting it just slightly, and Chloe jumps. Goosebumps raise on her skin as Max’s finger circles, a wicked grin on her face. She lifts her head up, and her blue eyes are wide and dilated and _quite_ red. A pang of guilt hits Chloe just before Max rises up and kisses her again, swinging her legs, wrapping her thighs around Chloe’s hips. Her kisses are sloppy, wet, and smiling. Chloe drinks them in, forgets about guilt, forgets about everything but Max’s giddy love.

Max ends up pushing her down to the bed, straddling her, and having her on top is so comfortable and so right that Chloe throws her head back, letting loose a series of pained breaths as Max’s fingers slide up under the hem of her shirt. Her touch is light, delicate, tingly. It seems natural to lift her arms over her head when Max starts pulling off the shirt entirely.

Max pauses once she’s topless, her eyes drifting over Chloe’s body. There’s a hunger in there that Chloe isn’t sure she’s ever seen before. Not so obviously. Max’s fingers trail down her chest. She starts shaking, covering her mouth as it stretches into a huge, dopey grin.

“What?” Chloe asks.

“W-wowzer,” Max manages through her little hiccups of suppressed laughter.

“Oh my fucking God.” Chloe _has_ to kiss her, all over her stupid cute dumb corny nerd face. Her forehead. Her cheeks. Her nose. Her freckles. Her lips. Her chin. Her neck. Chloe sucks hard there, wants to leave her a little something to remember this moment, but—

Max’s whole body freezes.

 _Oh, God, I really did break her when I touched her,_ Chloe thinks, drawing back instantly. “Sorry, sorry,” she whispers frantically as Max sits up and rubs her neck, looking faraway.

“No, no, it’s okay,” Max says. “Just—just a bad memory. I’m sorry, things were...we were...”

“Max, really, it’s fine,” Chloe insists, sitting up to meet her eye level. “If I can keep myself off you for this long, I can wait a little longer. If you want to stop.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry, sorry,” Max repeats, and Chloe wraps her arms around her. “God, I thought I was over this.”

“It’s been like two months. You’ll be ready when you’re ready,” Chloe assures her.

“It’s just—when he took me, and shot you, he—he stuck a _needle_ —”

Chloe knows who Max is talking about, what timeline she’s reliving. She squeezes her tighter. “Okay. No touching the neck. Right?”

Max swallows and nods against her shoulder. “I—I guess so.”

“Okay.”

“I really _wanted_ to, Chloe, I...”

“I know. I get it.” She does. Max is more stable these days, more like her old self, maybe even a little better. More talkative, more confident. But she still gets nightmares. She still remembers a hundred awful things that didn’t happen. She still needs Chloe to just _be there_ sometimes. So she will.

“Hey,” she says after a moment of rubbing Max’s back. “Let’s watch something stupid.”

“What?”

“That’s what you do when you’re high. Like, number one activity.”

Max separates herself from Chloe and gives her a wavering smile.

“I’ll keep my top off,” Chloe promises, patting Max on the shoulder and shifting her off of her lap. She gets up and grabs Max’s laptop, then heads back to the bed and positions herself against the wall, letting Max snuggle up to her as she scrolls through streams. They share a blanket and settle in. As the lights and sounds of old cartoons and unearthed YouTube gold wash over them, Max’s fingers wander a bit, playing with Chloe’s piercings. It’s nice, but it doesn’t light a fire in her. It’s just good, light teasing. The way Max collapses into snorting giggles at the dumbest jokes is much more important.

The moment died. But there will be others. There have already been a lot of moments, captured on the wall behind them. They spread out from the blue butterfly, slowly filling the space October left behind. They have all the time in the world.


	6. Shipping Out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one gets a little rough before it gets better. Fair warning.

Or they don’t have any fucking time at all.

Christmas break sneaks up on Chloe the same way a lot of things do: she first hears about it when it’s months away and therefore it gets filed into the ‘in the distant future’ area in her brain. And then nobody brings it up until it’s almost there. Plus a bit of very deliberate ignorance. So when Max murmurs, “I’m gonna miss you,” one Wednesday night, Chloe practically jumps out of bed.

“Woah, wait, what?” she asks, immediately beginning to pace the small length of Max’s dorm.

Max gives her a raised, sleepy eyebrow as she rolls over to look at her. “I’m going back to Seattle for Christmas, remember?”

Shit. Yeah. She remembers. Max told her like forever ago and she basically point-blank refused to acknowledge it. But saying that would be stupid, so: “Oh, and I’m going with you, right?”

“Uh, I thought Joyce would kind of like to see you over the holidays...” Max admits, wringing her hands. “She might’ve been texting me to tell me not to run off with you...”

“Come on, fuck that,” Chloe groans. “I—You _just_ came back.”

“I know.” Max looks away. “Believe me, I want to stay here, or have you come with me, but...Both of our parents kind of want to see us. Especially mine. We can’t just lock everyone else out and be, like, That Couple who have no friends and don’t pay attention to anyone else...”

 _Yeah, we can_ , Chloe grumbles to herself. She doesn’t need anyone but Max. But...”Yeah, I guess you’re right. You should, like, go see your Seattle friends or whatever.” She flumps down on the edge of the bed. Her hands hang in her lap as she thinks of the last time Max left. The last time she was alone in Arcadia Bay.

 _Do not fucking cry, Price_ , she demands. But the way Max’s hand softly lights on her shoulder shoots that plan down quick. At least it’s quiet, just tears, not sobbing and snot and shaking.

“Hey,” Max whispers. “I’m coming back.”

Chloe clears her throat and pretends she wasn’t being stupid. “You better.”

“I _am_.”

“I know.”

Max shifts behind her and rubs Chloe’s back. “I want you to see me off. My parents are coming Saturday morning. I want to...I want them to see you again in person. And I wanna tell them about us.”

“Wait, you haven’t yet?” Chloe asks.

“I...didn’t really know how to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I met up with Chloe again and now we’re living in sin’ over the phone.”

Chloe chuckles. “Okay, you got a point.”

“You’re really important to me, Chloe.” Max rests her head on Chloe’s shoulder, her arms wrapping around her. “I want to do everything right.”

“You can always just rewind until it is,” Chloe reminds her.

“It’s—it’s not as special, that way. Life isn’t, really. It doesn’t mean as much when I can just repeat it, over and over, until I get what I want,” Max says. “I don’t like using it anymore. It makes me feel fake.”

Chloe leans back into Max’s lap and closes her eyes. “Well, just don’t not rewind if something really goes to shit, okay? I know I said not to ever do it again, but if you...if someone could hurt you...”

“Emergencies only.”

“Good.”

She lets Max’s fingers comb through her hair until she can imagine that she really is coming back, this time.

 

* * *

 

Juliet and Dana are talking about...something. Probably. Chloe’s leaning against the outside wall of the dorms, smoking her fourth cigarette, and they’re hovering around her the way they do these days, waiting for her to take an interest. Christmas something. Trevor something. Zach something. Max—

“Hmm?” Chloe blinks at the two of them.

The two of them exchange the Best Friend Look, which usually means they’re about to gang up on Chloe, so she braces herself. But Juliet actually looks concerned. And nosy, but that’s her default setting.

“You and Max doing okay?” she asks, shifting a hand to her hip.

“Great,” Chloe says, biting down hard on the _t_.

There’s the look again.

“What?” Chloe asks, splaying her hands out at her sides. “I got a tumor on my face or something? What are you two lookin’ at?”

“You’ve been, like, Phantom of the Dorms for the last day and a half,” Dana says. “Hanging around looking down at everyone. You nearly gave Kate a heart attack.”

“Hey, now, that was an accident, I didn’t see her when I jumped out the window,” Chloe clarifies.

“Yeah, and what you did to Victoria—” Juliet adds.

“Didn’t do shit to Vicky,” Chloe mumbles, leaning back against the wall.

“Chloe, like, everyone saw you,” Juliet says, rolling her eyes.

“Not my fault bitches are clumsy. Should watch where she’s goin’.”

“Just because you scare the shit out of her doesn’t mean you can ruin her project,” Dana accuses.

“It was not _ruined_ , God, it just got a little wet, if she really cared she’dve threatened to sue the school again,” Chloe says, blowing smoke out. “What’s with the interrogation?”

“We’re your friends and something’s obviously wrong?” Juliet offers.

Chloe’s shoulders tense. She’s about to say, _You’re not my friends_ , but shit, they kind of are. She hasn’t really considered the idea, but she’s got people in Arcadia Bay who know who she is, don’t hate her, and talk to her regularly. Weird.  And they’re calling her out on her bullshit, and if she can dish it out, well, she guesses, she better be able to take it.

She deflates, loses her defensive posture. “Fine,” she sighs. “Go ahead and _investigate_ , Juliet.”

“Seriously, is there something going on between you and Max?” Juliet asks again.

“Yeah, she’s my girlfriend.”

“ _Chloe_ ,” both of them say at once.

“ _Uuuuugh_ fine she’s leaving for Christmas break and I can’t come with her and it fucking sucks, all right?” Chloe takes a sharp pull off her cigarette while Dana and Juliet’s expressions soften.

“Oh, good,” Juliet says. “God, I thought you were fighting. That’d be much worse.”

“Terrifying,” Dana agrees.

“It’s not good, it fucking sucks,” Chloe repeats. “She’s gonna be gone for _two weeks_.”

“I mean, Trevor’s going back home, too,” Dana says.

“And Zach and I broke up,” Juliet adds.

“Again?”

“Hey—”

“You’re not that broke-up about it,” Chloe notes, jabbing her cigarette in Juliet’s direction. “If you talk shit about me, Jules, I talk shit about you, fair’s fair,” she insists over Juliet’s sputtering objections.

“It’s pointless arguing with you, Chloe,” Juliet admits, dropping her hand from her hip.

“But why does it bother you so much? You guys, like, live together. You don’t ever want, I don’t know, a break?” Dana asks, shrugging with the last question.

“Well, one, no, I don’t, ever. Two...” Chloe thinks for a second, tries to remember what conversations the three of them have had out here. “I never told you two our big tragic backstory, huh?” she asks, pointing the cigarette between the two of them.

“You just kind of showed up one day,” Dana confirms.

“Look, we were best friends when we were kids. Then my dad died and Max moved away in like the same month,” Chloe says, mushing her words together a little bit. “And the whole time she was gone, she didn’t...it was like she disappeared. No calls, no texts, nothing. I was super pissed when she came back.”

“That doesn’t sound like Max,” Dana says.

“Sounds like a pre-October Max,” Chloe clarifies.

“But now you’re girlfriends,” Juliet prods.

“Yeah, and you’ve been waffling with Zach for two months even though he’s like always cheating on you forever,” Chloe points out. She takes another pull off her cigarette, burning it down nearly enough for the end to touch her fingers. “We’re okay now. Obviously. But, you know. Still think about it.”

“Well, we’ll keep you company over break,” Dana promises, fishing her phone out of her pocket. “Here, actually. Gimme your number.”

“Yeah, no disappearing on us,” Juliet confirms as the two of them step closer and corner Chloe with their phones. “No moping just because Max is gone.”

Even as Chloe insists that she doesn’t mope, she’s smiling, jabbing her number into their contact lists. These two are nosy as fuck and way too nice. Kinda like Max. Not the same, obviously. But the thought of two weeks without Max seems a little less shitty.

 

* * *

 

But still.

_She’s not coming back. She won’t have nightmares there because it’s not the town where the shittiest things in her life went down. She won’t need you anymore, and she’ll want to stay with her friends over there, and she’ll text you a breakup note and leave you stranded again and you deserve that because the only reason she stays here is you._

Shut up shut up shut up. Chloe pours her third shot at Max’s desk, using the rum’s cap as her glass.

_She was so much happier before she met you again._

Shut up. She downs her drink, feels the burn in her throat. Glances at the clock in the corner of Max’s laptop. She’ll be home soon, and she’ll say something nice and this won’t suck so hard. Chloe doesn’t need to keep doing this. Doesn’t need to keep thinking this. These thoughts are bullshit. She knows that, she always knows that. But still.

_Someone in Seattle likes her, and they’ll take better care of her._

Fine. Four shots. Fuck it. Not like it matters anyway. She’ll be gone soon and Chloe can go back to being in the pit. Going nowhere.

She hears footsteps in the hall and quickly caps the bottle and hides it under her jacket on the floor. Stupid. _Why do you even care if she knows, maybe it’s better for her to leave pissed off_. Shut up. Have to look good for Max.

When she comes in, she gives Chloe a tired smile. “Done with my last final,” she announces, shoulders sagging as the door closes behind her. “Thank God that’s over with.”

The orange light of a winter sunset makes her eyes sparkle. Gives contrast to the lines of her small body. Chloe’s staring.

“Hey, you okay?”

Chloe _takes_ her.

She grabs her by the shoulders and pushes her up against the door, _not the neck, not the neck_ , and kisses her hard, teeth scraping on her lower lip. She’s stiff, at first, but then she’s kissing back, her hands traveling up Chloe’s sides. Chloe breaks for a second and lifts off Max’s bookbag, throwing it against the wall and then pressing herself against Max again. She wrenches Max’s hoodie off of her shoulders, pinning her arms behind her as she slips out of the sleeves. As soon as it’s off, Chloe grabs the hem of Max’s shirt and starts rolling it up her stomach. She can feel the tremors in Max’s body. Good. She won’t forget _this_ , no matter what she fucking does. _Can’t get your virginity back_ , Chloe thinks as she lifts Max’s shirt over her head, runs her hands over her bra. _If you leave me, then at least I’ll have made you come so fucking hard—_

No.

This isn’t the way this happens.

This isn’t the way she wants to think of Max.

Chloe doesn’t stop on a dime this time. She wraps her arms around Max instead of pinning her, slows down the pace of her lips, her tongue. Max’s shivers subside, and her body relaxes, her skin hot against Chloe. By the time their lips part, everything seems a little calmer. More clear. Chloe rests her head on top of Max’s and holds her close.

“W-what the hell was that, Chloe?” Max mumbles.

“Sorry.”

“No, I mean, I liked it—it was kind of scary, but—”

“I was thinking stupid.” Chloe figures she might as well just admit it before Max figures it out on her own. “I—God. Just bad. If I’d kept going, I wouldn’t have liked myself after. I don’t want it to be scary.” It has to be perfect. Start slow, relaxed, happy. Not like this. Too much Chloe bullshit involved right now.

“Good,” Max says. “I don’t either, I just thought — since, tomorrow, I’m—”

“God, no, Max, don’t fucking let me do shit like that. Not ever,” Chloe demands, pulling back and looking her in the eye. “Don’t let _anyone_. You’ll...” Chloe swallows, thinks back to her own regrets. “You don’t want that in your head. I want...I want all our firsts to be...”

Max closes the distance this time, hugging Chloe tight. “I would’ve told you to stop,” she promises.

“Yeah, you say that, and then your head comes up with all these reasons why you can’t back out now, and just—go with your first fucking instinct with this shit, Max. Don’t think you need to keep me happy. I can deal with it.” Chloe feels sick again. With what she could’ve done.

“Chloe, I swear to God I was actually getting super turned on.” Max rubs Chloe’s back. “I was just kind of nervous. And you tasted...Just believe me. If you went, like, a second longer, I would’ve stopped you. To talk, at least, because I wasn’t sure _you_ were happy.”  She steps back and looks away. “Y-you know I worry when you drink like that.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“I just worry.”

Max takes Chloe’s hand and leads her to the bed, sitting down on the edge. “I _really_ want to sometimes, Chloe. More often than you think. You don’t need — you don’t need to torture yourself over it. When we’re both ready, it’ll happen. We’ll know.”

Chloe summons the nerve to look at her again. Her freckle-flecked chest, covered by nothing but that cute little pink bra, glows in the sunlight. There’s a flush of red between her breasts, the shine of sweat. _She wants you too, idiot_ , Chloe tells herself. _She loves you, too._ She just nods and hugs her again, kisses her soft and slow and apologetic.

Now isn’t the time. The future’s gonna suck too much, and Chloe’s brain gets stuck on things like that. But the way Max is talking, like there’s no doubt they’ll still be together, it soothes the voices more than the alcohol did.

Chloe thinks of the way Rachel talked about shit like that. It was always ‘ifs’ and ‘one days’ and other uncertainties. It was how she kept you loving her, wanting to please her, so it would all come true. Worked on everyone. Frank, Nathan, Chloe, even fucking Jefferson if the shit he says in his interviews is true.

Max isn’t like that. Max means what she says. Max is going to come out to her parents tomorrow, show them her crazy depressed punk girlfriend. Of course Max will come back.

Max puts her shirt back on, and Chloe helps her pack for the trip. She cries a little bit when she puts William’s camera in the suitcase. But Max is there to hold her. To cuddle up to her when they sleep. To keep Chloe warm, and safe, no matter how hard she tries to sabotage herself.

 

* * *

 

“They’re here.”

Chloe looks up from her phone. Max is sitting on her bed, all ready to go. Shoes on and everything. She’s fiddling with the strings on her jacket with one hand, the other reading her texts. “Ready?”

“Yeah.” Well, kind of. But Max is nervous as fuck, so Chloe has to put on the don’t-give-a-shit face. Chloe gets up from Max’s office chair as the sound of two voices grows closer to the door. Max stands up and squeezes her hand.

“I am such a nervous wreck right now,” she says, running a hand through her hair.

“Hey, don’t look at me, my mom apparently figured it out before I was born,” Chloe says with a grin. “C’mon, they love the shit out of you,” she adds as Max looks up at her with her best sad-kitten eyes. “And it’s not like they’re Bible-thumpers. It’s gonna be okay.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure,” Max agrees hastily.

Knocks at the door. “Come in!” Max shouts, a little too loud.

Ryan’s the first through. He has the same stupid lumberjack beard he had the last time Chloe saw him. He stops in his tracks. Looks to Chloe. Looks to Max.

“Chloe, your hair is _blue_ ,” are the first words out of his mouth as Vanessa peers around him.

“And you’re rocking that hipster beard. You know, for a corpse,” Chloe replies, grinning at him. She always liked Ryan.

“Is that really Chloe?” Vanessa asks, stepping in beside her husband. She looks at their linked hands. “Max...do you need to tell us something?”

Max looks up at Chloe again, and Chloe just cocks her head towards Ryan and Vanessa. Max takes a deep breath.

“Yeah. But it’s kind of a long story...”


	7. S.O.S.

Everything is boring.

Which is better than being bullshit, which is what everything was before Max came back. But still.

Music is boring. TV is boring _._ Dana lent her a Netflix account but everything on there is boring too. Studying is _super_ boring, but it’s at least got some kind of end-goal, some reason to do it, so Chloe does a lot of it. She gets better at it, too. She’s definitely not failing her pre-tests anymore. Her notebook fills up, and she has to go out and snag a new one. But even the rising scores are just a little less boring than everything else. They sure as shit aren’t _fun_.

Also not fun is the nicotine withdrawal from another attempt to quit, which is making her kind of bitchy. She knows she’s getting kind of bitchy, so she stays away from people, most of the time. Joyce complains about her hanging out in her room all the time, but not too much, because every time she comes in she sees Chloe hunched over a notebook. David lets her be, to her shock. She hears him tell Joyce, once, “She’s planning for her future. Can’t be mad at her for that.”

Max isn’t boring. Their nightly calls always make Chloe feel like some kind of gargoyle in comparison, though they keep thoughts of abandonment and cheating out of her head the minute they start. Max talks about hanging out with old friends, coming out to them, roaming around Seattle and taking pictures. She takes a lot with her phone so that Chloe can see them, too. She says “I love you” every night. Chloe can’t contribute much to the conversation because everything is boring, but Max hardly seems to mind. If she notices that Chloe looks like a lost puppy, she doesn’t say.

Dana and Juliet, on the other hand, are not so delicate with her. They needle at her constantly through her phone, coordinated attacks on moping, and Chloe goes out with them on occasion just to shut them up. Most of the time it’s boring too, but it’s also strangely nice, just to hang out with them at some restaurant or hookah bar or whatever for a couple hours. She doesn’t talk much with them, either, but just having her around seems to make their arguments more energetic, as if Chloe’s opinionated ass is rubbing off on them.

They do take her out to the pretentious arthouse theater, and that isn’t boring. Almost worse. It's this movie, _Inside Something Something_ , about this asshole, and a cat, and the music industry. It’s weird and dreamy and kind of darkly funny, and the whole time, Chloe can only think about how fucking Max this movie is. The way it’s shot, the weird mood, the awkward dialog. She would love this.

As they leave the theater, Dana gives Chloe a concerned look. “Jesus, it wasn’t _that_ depressing,” she says, jabbing at Chloe’s shoulder.

“It kind of was,” Juliet adds as they approach Chloe’s truck. Chloe shrugs. Yeah, it didn’t end great. His life went in a big circle after a really shitty week, and he ended up broke and hating himself and going nowhere fast.

Shit.

Dana gets drawn into talking about folk music with Juliet long enough for Chloe to unlock her truck and get her weed from the glovebox. As she leans against the hood and packs a bowl, she picks up one of Juliet’s questions: “You think he was a real guy?”

“Course he was a real guy,” Chloe says. “Might not’ve been his name, but you know there was a guy like that. Someone hung around the scene, fucked up a bunch of people’s lives before they dumped him, sucked at actually getting anywhere, then disappeared ‘cuz he fucked up all his friendships.”

They exchange The Look as Chloe takes her first hit. Whatever, so she’s obviously brainsick, they know that already. She’s still right. Always some loser hanging at the edge of the scene, messing up everyone’s good time.

“I’m gonna look him up,” Juliet says, taking out her phone as Chloe passes the pipe to Dana.

After she takes a hit, she puts a hand on Chloe’s shoulder and asks, “Seriously, Chloe, you doing okay? You seem pretty down.”

“You are gonna be the naggiest mom,” Chloe says. Dana looks kind of shocked, her face paling. Juliet looks up for a second and gives Chloe a Look, but she’s not quite sure what it means. She hasn’t mastered their flavor of Girl Visual Language yet. “What?” she asks.

“Never mind,” Juliet says pointedly, snatching the pipe from Dana’s grasp. “Also you avoided the question.” She takes a hit off the still-cherried pipe with one hand while scrolling through the phone with the other.

“Look, I’m sad ‘cuz Max is gone, what else is new?” It feels weird to say it out loud, but she does, and gives the both of them a kind of aggressive shrug.

“Is it possible to be whipped when she’s not actually whipping you?” Dana wonders aloud as Juliet hands off the pipe to Chloe.

“This is my weed we’re smoking,” Chloe warns, shaking the pipe at her.

“Also, not a real guy. Based on a real guy,” Juliet says. “The real guy was nice.”

“We said no moping, Chloe,” Dana continues, even as Chloe passes to her.

“How’re ya gonna stop me?” Chloe challenges. “Fuck, I could run off and go drink myself stupid and shoot bottles in the junkyard and you skinny bitches wouldn’t even be able to chase me down because _I_ drove us here.”

“Chloe, you’re skinnier than both of us,” Juliet notes.

“Let’s hit up that new Mexican place,” Dana suggests. “The way to Chloe’s heart is through spice and grease.”

“And paying for all her shit,” Juliet agrees.

“Like you two have jobs,” Chloe snorts. “Just ‘cuz your parents are loaded...”

“And we’re sharing our good fortune.” Dana passes off to Juliet, who sucks in remarkably hard, the crackling audible even through the harsh, cold wind of Arcadia Bay’s December. When she hands it back to Chloe, the bowl is black and grey as hell, obviously dead. Juliet looks sort of pleased with herself as she wavers in place, her eyes cloudy and red.

“Lightweights,” Chloe says, affectionately. “Mexican it is.”

They’re still nosy. Nagging. Nice. Trading barbs with them somehow always manages to bring Chloe out of a funk, probably because they’re both surprisingly sharp, for Blackwell preps. Another thing to thank Max for. The thought just makes her chest ache more, but the girls are around to keep her prickly, defensive, and argumentative, and somehow, someway, that makes her feel a little more alive.

 

* * *

 

Absence makes the heart grow fungus, or something. Her chest feels heavy and gross, for sure.

Max couldn’t make her call last night. Said she had family stuff to do, over text. Chloe went to bed as soon as that message came through. No point in staying up. Boring, boring, boring. Christmas will be boring too. Has been since Dad died. There’s no big pile of presents under the tree, just one or two for each of them, and Chloe’s broke as hell, still, so it’s not like she got them anything.

She rolls over in her bed, watching the cloudy sky lighten, light snow falling past her window. Remembers another early morning in this house. Max beside her. Calming her down after a night of self-destruction. That had been exciting, in good and bad ways. Not boring. Max brings life to this shithole town.

Knocks on her door. “Chloe! Get dressed!” David barks.

“Huhwhatthefuck?” Chloe mumbles, barely turning her head. He cannot be serious.

“Your mother says get dressed and come downstairs in a half hour at the earliest.”

“David, it is like seven in the morning on a _holiday_.”

“For once, I’m not orderin’ you, I swear it’s your mother.”

Chloe listens. Hears someone moving shit around downstairs. Then a vacuum. _Okay, Mom, what the fuck ever_ , _you want the classic family Christmas with your nineteen-year-old, cool,_ Chloe thinks as she pulls herself out of bed. “Fine, this better be good.”

“I’ll let her know.”

Chloe runs a hand through her hair, which she’d slept on while it was still wet. Okay, least-holey jeans (because God it is freezing in this house right now), long-sleeved plaid. Good enough. She checks her hair in the mirror. She needs to re-dye it, at some point, or she’ll start looking normal. And probably cut it. She can put it in a ponytail now.

She checks her phone. Nothing. She sends a quick _merry christmas nerd_ off, then a _parents are acting weird as fuck, hope they let you sleep in_. She ends up staring at the phone, flipping through old messages. Wishing she could just talk to her. Wishing she’d woken up next to her. Holidays suck.

The doorbell rings.

“Chloe, get the door!” Joyce shouts from downstairs.

“What—the fuck, why me?” Chloe yells back. “You’re already down there!”

“Don’t you swear at me, young lady.”

“Who even is it?”

“Don’t know!”

“Bullshit!”

“Language!”

Chloe throws her hands up. Joyce is apparently deciding to sic her on whoever’s dumb enough to go door-to-door on Christmas morning. Well, fine, she can play the guard dog. She leaves her room and thumps down the stairs, not sparing a glance beyond the window in the door before she opens it, already asking, “What the—”

Max smiles up at her from behind a red scarf, snowflakes in her hair. Her eyes shine. Her cheeks flush.

Chloe tackles her.

She gasps in shock and laughter as Chloe carries her out straight past her parents, kissing her over and over. It doesn’t fucking matter how this happened, even as they fall to the ground and Max tries to explain it. Chloe’s too busy kissing her to listen or care. She’s so goddamned cute, all bundled up in her winter coat, and Chloe’s feet are freezing in the gross half-slush that’s on the lawn but goddamn it she does not _care_.

Behind her, she hears an amused, “Well, that’s about what we expected,” from Vanessa. Chloe very much wants to flip all of them off, because fuck them they do not fucking _matter_ Max is here, but then she thinks, _they just drove like six hours in the dead of night for this_. And she pulls herself off a panting Max and tosses her hair behind her back, and asks a very eloquent, “Max, what the fuck?”

“I told them this could be their big present for me this year,” Max says, grinning wildly.

Chloe looks behind her again, at the group of four adults standing on the porch. Still that urge to flip them off, but it would be affectionate. They don’t quite speak that language, though, and the Caulfields are busy introducing themselves to David, so Chloe goes right back to kissing Max until Joyce calls out, “Chloe, you’ll get frostbite on your toes.”

The slush _is_ super gross and Max’s whole back is probably wet and cold, so Chloe reluctantly stands up, taking Max’s hand and pulling her to her feet. Holding her hand’s not enough, Chloe has to wrap an arm around her and hold her tight for the whole walk to the door, grinning like an idiot.

“Ain’t she the cat who caught the canary,” Joyce says through a wide smile. Chloe’s lost in the feeling of holding Max. The smell of her hair. Her cheeks hurt from smiling so much.

Once everyone’s in and settled in the living room, explanations come out. Max’s idea from the start. Joyce’s idea to make sure it was the morning so Chloe would be too groggy to suspect anything. Vanessa and Ryan agreed to it because they’d both gotten back in contact with Joyce and they wanted to see her, meet this new husband of hers, and all four of them had noticed how much their girls were aching to see each other. So they adjusted sleep schedules. They made up the guest bed. They packed their Christmas into their little sedan and drove it for six hours through the dark to make this happen. Even David looks pleased with himself, even if his only role was to keep quiet.

Chloe listens to all of it, sitting on the couch with Max leaning against her, and she wills herself not to cry. At all of these people who love her so much, to put so much effort into surprising her and making her happy. They’re not standing in the way of her and Max, it’s not them versus the world, like it felt back in October. It feels better than that. It feels like home.

She cries a little bit.

Ryan and Vanessa look very alarmed, but Max just holds her close and buries her head into Chloe’s shoulder. “T-thank you all so much,” Chloe stammers out. “Shit, you guys.”

“Language, Chloe,” Joyce reminds her, cracking a smirk.

“God, I didn’t even get you guys anything, I am such a _loser —_ ”

Max shushes her quickly with a kiss, and the guilt-trip already moving in the back of Chloe’s mind stops. So maybe they’re being a little gross with the PDA, and maybe Chloe doesn’t deserve all this love, but they want to give it. Their choice.

“Come on, let’s get the presents out!” Ryan says.

“And breakfast, breakfast is important,” Joyce adds, rising from the dining room table. “David, come and help me in the kitchen, will you?”

The adults seem to take it as unspoken truth that Chloe and Max get to stay put and cuddle, and Chloe loves them all for that, too. Chloe lays back and stretches herself across the couch, Max on top of her.  “Max, you are still a miracle worker,” Chloe murmurs as Max settles into her, her head on her chest. “How many times did you have to rewind to get them to agree to this shit?”

“Just good old-fashioned nagging and looking sad,” Max replies, smiling up at her. “It didn’t take _that_ much convincing once Joyce backed me up on how mopey you were.”

“I was _not_ moping.”

“You so were.”

“I so was.”

Max giggles, and Chloe kisses the top of her head. “I really didn’t get you anything,” she says after a minute. “I thought I could catch something on a post-Christmas sale before you got back.”

“You didn’t need to get me anything. I’m here. I’m happy.”

“Stop being so fucking cute,” Chloe demands, shaking Max’s shoulder. She turns over and crawls up Chloe’s body, and they share another kiss, and it is goddamned perfect. She is goddamned perfect.

She hears a distinctive throat-clear, and the two of them part to look sheepishly up at Vanessa.

“Max, honey, there are other people here,” she says, scratching the back of her neck.

“Um, sorry,” Max says, her face turning beet-red. The two of them scramble back to sitting positions to make room for everyone else.  But just as Joyce is bringing out steaming hot plates of bacon pancakes, Max squeezes Chloe’s hand and promises in a whisper, _“Later_.” A tingle runs up Chloe’s spine.

Ryan and Vanessa take up positions next to them on the couch, and dining chairs are pulled out from the table for Joyce and David. Presents are postponed so that pancakes can be rapidly consumed and complimented, but as soon as Joyce takes the plate off her lap, David dumps a big, soft package onto it. Unwrapped, just a white box with a loose lid.

“Well, you’re excited,” Chloe says suspiciously, eyeing David’s raised eyebrows.

“Just open it, Chloe.”

With a shrug, Chloe throws the lid off, and her eyes widen. She lifts it out, runs her fingers along it. Shiny. Soft on the inside. Heavy. Black. A fucking _gorgeous_ leather jacket, brand new, not some five-dollar thrift-store trash with a thousand holes in it. This thing must’ve cost at least a hundred, maybe two hundred dollars. Holy shit.

“Now, before you put it on, you have to promise me not to call me step-douche anymore,” David warns, a cautious smile on his face.

Chloe hasn’t called him that in months. Not since Jefferson, not since Max told her about his heroism. Not since he became responsible, in a way, for the best thing in her life.  It’s just been David. But she knows what this is. A peace offering. An apology. An admission.

“Not for the rest of my goddamned life,” she says, immediately wrapping the jacket around herself and it is super fucking warm and comfy and damn, he has a good eye. And then, without warning, she leaps to her feet and hugs him. Because of the jacket. Because of October. Because he’s just like her, he’s damaged and he lashes out and he does dumb shit to the people he loves out of fear sometimes but goddammit he is _trying_ to get better, and so is she. He is in total shock for a moment, but he hugs her back, briefly, almost formally, but even that’s a big step for him, so she’ll take it.

Joyce gives him a kiss as he sits back down next to her, and the sight doesn’t fill Chloe with disgust, so that’s good, too.

The adults have presents for each other, and Chloe sort of zones out while they exchange them, letting Max lean into her new leather jacket and rub her shampoo scent all over it like a cat. Chloe gets a couple of movies, but she doesn’t really register them. They just go on the coffee table for later review. Max perks up when Joyce, Vanessa, and Ryan all say they’ve pulled together for something, and is struck dumb once she unwraps their gift. A camera, of course, but judging by the way Max is hyperventilating and babbling thanks, it’s A. expensive as fuck B. definitely some hipster film camera instead of digital. She sets it down _very_ cautiously on the coffee table and stares hungrily at it as Joyce says, “And one more for Chloe, I think.”

“Hmm? What, no, I’m good,” Chloe insists, “You can’t seriously have more for me.”

“Oh, hush,” Joyce insists. “Vanessa, you’ve got it squirreled away somewhere, right?”

Vanessa digs through the pile of wrapping paper at her feet and draws out a package, wrapped in plain blue paper. “This is from Max,” she tells Chloe as she hands it over. “And me. And Joyce.”

“God, this better not make me cry again,” Chloe warns, sniffing as Max shoots her a guilty smile. She carefully takes hold of the corners and unwraps the — book, it’s a little book, unlabeled, just a blue butterfly painted on the cover. Memories of Vanessa’s paintings fill Chloe’s head, and she’s already close to crying, and Max puts an arm around her shoulder as she slumps in her seat. She knows what this is.

“Max got a little choked-up while we were making it, too,” Vanessa says warmly, opening the book for her. Chloe turns the first page.

It’s everything. All the shots Max ever took of them, starting with a disposable camera when they were eight. Carefully selected by Max’s hand. Some of them she recognizes from Joyce’s photo albums, probably sent to Seattle in secret last week. Some of them, she remembers Max hiding away before she could see them.

But there’s a special section. Labeled ‘October and Everything After’.

These are all new, and they’re all great. She puts her hand to her mouth when she sees the one from Wednesday morning. Just before their first kiss, both of them so happy and relaxed in the morning light. And there’s so many others, that she never even saw Max take, but they’re all Chloe, and the love and care in their framing is so obvious that she has to stifle a gasp. This is Max’s art. This is what matters most in the world to her, and she’s dedicating it to Chloe, of all people.

So the tears are welling up. Who cares.

Everyone else is talking around her and Max, remarking on the memories held in those photos, reminiscing about old times. Chloe feels like she and Max are in their own little bubble. Every time she looks over, there’s those blue eyes, pleading.

“So...do you like it?” she asks quietly.

“What the hell kind of question is that?” Chloe’s voice breaks. “I love it.”

“I thought you might.”

The last picture is Chloe standing in the Blackwell parking lot, hugging herself, her face wide open and vulnerable in the morning light. Taken from the car window. Chloe’s lips are just slightly parted, and she can remember what she whispered. _Come back_. And written beneath the photo, _I did._

Max rubs Chloe’s shoulder as she turns into a snotty mess. Not too loud, thankfully. The parents are too busy talking to notice. She wipes her face after a minute, closes the book. Sets it beside the camera.

“C’mon,” Max says standing up. “Let’s hit the beach, Chloe.”

“Uh, Caulfield, it is snowing,” Chloe says, wiping her nose again.

“Yeah, so let’s break in that jacket and my camera.”

“You two leaving us?” Joyce asks as Chloe gets to her feet.

“Guess so,” Chloe replies, taking the scrapbook.

“Well, have fun. I’ll text you when we’re gonna have lunch,” Joyce says. “Go on, get.”

Chloe still has to get shoes on, so Max follows her upstairs. Once she’s in her room, she looks around.

“God, I have to clean up my shit,” she moans. “I am not losing this.”

“Just put it on the bed for now, we’ll find a place for it,” Max says.

“In a hurry, Max?”

“I just want you alone.”

Chloe looks over at her. She’s got an evil grin, and Chloe’s heart skips a beat. She throws the book on the bed without a second thought.


	8. Safe Harbor

Chloe and Max have very little to talk about. They’ve been talking every day, after all. Texting back and forth. Always connected. They don’t need to talk on the drive there, or when they’re walking along the beach, Max pausing every once in a while to snap something with her new camera. The silence is not just comfortable, it is comforting. Chloe doesn’t need to ask her why she’s even here, why she would go through everything for her. The answer’s obvious in their intertwined fingers, in Max’s face, in the cold that they’re weathering together for no reason.

Chloe’s phone buzzes, and she pulls it out to find the group text active. Juliet’s demanding, “ _I need a picture of everyone’s haul. Here’s mine._ ”

“Hang on, my turn,” Chloe says, letting go of Max’s hand and backing up a couple of steps. To get her face against the curve of the beach. Max gives her a bemused smile. Perfect. Chloe snaps the picture with her phone and sends it, receiving the texting equivalent of teen-girl-screeches in return, all keysmashing and excessive punctuation. Max brings out her own phone, looks at her messages, and giggles.

“Juliet’s yelling at me for not telling her,” she explains as Chloe takes her hand again. “Like she wouldn’t have spoiled the surprise.”

“She would’ve blown it,” Chloe agrees. “I can see it now, big headline: ‘World’s Best Girlfriend Coming Back to Town, Everyone Just Be Cool.’”

Max laughs, then stuffs the phone back in her pocket and faces Chloe. “I...” She looks down, the wind blowing her snow-flecked hair around her face. “I’m just so happy I got to be here today. With you. I’m so glad everything worked out, I can’t believe...”

Chloe leans down and kisses her. It feels like the right move, and Max seems to agree, standing on tiptoe to grab the back of Chloe’s hair. She’s intent on tasting her, her tongue strong and intense and demanding, and by the time they break apart they’re both panting.

“We need to get back to the truck,” Max breathes.

“Yeah. Yeah we do.”

They race each other back up the beach, kicking up wet sand with each step until they hit the parking lot. Chloe’s hands shake as she pulls out her keys and opens her door, Max bouncing on her heels behind her. Chloe takes a second to turn on the heat and unzip her jacket before unlocking the passenger side, because as soon as Max gets in her hands will be _occupied_.

Max slams her door shut, dumps her bag and camera at her feet, and lunges off her seat and onto Chloe’s lap. She shakingly unzips her jacket while they kiss, letting it fall off her shoulders as Chloe tries to memorize her taste. Both of their hands start wandering quickly, Max’s nervous fingers fumbling with the buttons on Chloe’s shirt, Chloe reaching around and grabbing her ass. The heat in this thing sucks, but Chloe’s feeling hot already, digging her nails into denim, gasping as Max’s cold fingers reach beneath her jacket and shirt and _squeeze_. Their kisses are growing sloppier by the second, and Max is shifting her weight, placing Chloe’s thigh between her legs, and—

Something roars past the window, and Chloe barely needs a glance to realize it’s Frank’s RV, and the two of them share a panicked look as Max climbs off and struggles across the seat. Chloe takes Max’s jacket off the pedals and throws it at her, then jams the car into gear and peels out, speeding along the back roads as far away from that lot as possible, not even thinking clearly _why_ they need to be super super fucking far away from that other vehicle, they just do, like, right now.

Max is laughing hysterically while she drives and drives, definitely over the speed limit, eventually pulling over into the shoulder once they seem far enough away. As she shifts into park, Max sighs, wiping sweat off her forehead.

“T-think this is private enough?” she asks, shifting over.

“Probably?” Chloe’s heart pounds as she stares at Max, her lips dry.

“Good enough.”

Max attacks her again, coming at her from the side this time, so Chloe swings her legs up underneath her and lays lengthwise across the seats, Max on top of her. Max’s hands are back under Chloe’s shirt in no time, rattling piercings between their fingers. Chloe can barely keep herself together, just clinging onto Max’s shirt, exploring her lips, her tongue, spasms forcing her to clench and unclench as Max plays. Max stops for a moment and tears her own top off, leaving her in just a plain white bra. She tosses it against the fogged windshield before leaning down for more Chloe. Chloe takes a chance, grabs Max’s breasts and then just _kneads_ them, and Max lets out these cute little moans as they kiss and holy _shit._

Just as Chloe reaches behind Max’s back to unhook her bra, Chloe’s pocket starts buzzing constantly, the ringtone, not a notification. Chloe groans and yells “Oh _fuck off_ ,” fumbling in her jeans while Max sits up and pushes sweaty hair off of her forehead. As she pulls out her phone, ready to silence it instantly and maybe throw it out a window, Max puts a hand on her wrist, panting, “Wait, wait, it’s Joyce.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to fucking answer it,” Chloe growls, but Max takes the phone out of her hands and swipes right, putting it to her ear.

“Finally! Y’all been ignoring my texts for almost an hour, where are you two?” drifts out of the phone as Chloe lays back and groans again.

“Sorry,” Max says after swallowing, fanning herself. “We, um, we got distracted.”

“Max, why are you answering — nevermind. Get your behinds back to the house, we’re all starving and waiting for you.”

Chloe says, “Tell her to eat without us,” but Max is already saying, “All right, we’ll be home soon, promise.”

“You better. And tell Chloe not to ignore me.”

As Max hangs up the phone and puts it on the dashboard, Chloe sighs. “Really, Max?” she asks, propping herself up on her elbows.

“I already feel like I need to change before I go back,” Max says, backing off of Chloe as she sits back up. “If we go any further, they’ll know exactly what...we were...”

“Who cares? Let ‘em know, we’re fucking adults,” Chloe grumbles, leaning back.

“No, really, I’m so—here, feel,” Max says, scooting close again and taking hold of Chloe’s wrist. Chloe’s eyes widen as she guides it beneath her waistband. She feels, all right. God, she’s so hot, and slick, and when Chloe’s middle finger brushes her stiff clit, Max freezes in place. Chloe stares right at her face as she slowly rocks her hand back and forth. Max closes her eyes, puts another hand on Chloe’s shoulder to brace herself as her face tightens. Her breath comes in short bursts, accompanied by soft moans. Chloe can’t kiss her, she just wants to watch, to see what she looks like when she—

A horn blares past the passenger side and the two of them jump apart, Chloe catching a glimpse of a blue POS sedan flying down the road, a custom license plate reading THXFLS retreating into the distance. “Oh, shit,” Chloe says, barely suppressing a laugh, “I think that was Warren.”

Max covers her face with both hands and lets out a little scream.

“Hey, he couldn’t have seen _that_ much,” Chloe goads, scooting closer to her.

“We have _got_ to stop before we get arrested for indecent exposure,” Max says, still hiding her face. “Oh my God.”

“Yeah, okay, that’s three times the universe has told us no,” Chloe admits. “And if you really wanna avoid that last one, you could just rewind...”

Max just shakes her head. “No, no, I’m the one who started it, I gotta deal with that.” For a second, she puts her hand out in front of her, but lets it drop with a  “Fuck.”

“You are never gonna live that down, if he’s got the balls to bring it up.”

“You were helping!”

“I was.” Chloe smirks. She’s so goddamned cute when she’s embarrassed. Her blush goes practically down to her navel. When Max peeks between her fingers at Chloe, she shoves her away.

“Quit _looking_ at me like that, we gotta go, seriously, God.” She snatches her shirt from the dash and pulls it over her head, letting out a sigh of relief. “I need to get more clothes on.”

Chloe thinks for a second, then slowly licks her fingers, getting her first taste of Max’s other lips. Chloe catches her staring. “Just a sampler,” she says, cocking an eyebrow. “Main course later, right?”

“Don’t _talk_ like that, we’re supposed to be calming down,” Max says through pursed lips, skin flushing anew.

“All right, fine, we’ll calm down,” Chloe says, rolling down the driver’s side window and letting the cold air in to clear the fog from the windshield.

“ _Thank_ you,” Max sighs, finding her jacket and wrapping it around herself, then fastening her seatbelt and opening her own window. “Later, I swear, but we’re not thinking about it now, we’re gonna go have a nice wholesome family Christmas, right?”

“Sure, keep telling yourself that,” Chloe says with a shrug. She feels light. Powerful. Max is so flustered and Chloe just feels goddamned _right_. When she looks over at Max, still blushing as the truck shifts into drive, she doesn’t think Max is a perfect angel. She’s just her awesome, adorable, horny-as-hell girlfriend, and they belong together. And they will be together. Max has no doubt, and that means Chloe doesn’t, either.

 

* * *

 

It goes on for the whole day.

Chloe manages to convince the household that the perfect thing to do during lunch is watch Die Hard, and once everyone’s settled in, Max throws a blanket over their laps. At first, Chloe thinks it’s just for the cold, but then Max’s fingers are drawing designs on her inner thighs for pretty much the whole movie.

When it’s time to help Joyce prepare the big dinner, Chloe and Max take turns in the kitchen, and every time they slide past each other they have to touch; usually it’s Chloe just lightly brushing her fingers on Max’s ass, keeping her on her toes. Max lacks the same boldness, but she doesn’t tell Chloe to stop, either, not even when the living room is vacant for a while because people are off either in the kitchen, the bathroom, or running errands to grab emergency forgotten supplies. They just hold each other on the couch, their fingers dancing on each other’s bodies, promises written in tactile sensation. Chloe knows this is way too much goddamned build-up, but they don’t have a choice, and besides, what Max will look like after all this is going to be so worth it.

They play with each other’s feet under the table at dinner and take sips of each other’s wine. Max drums her fingers while they wait for dessert and an excuse to go to bed and be alone together again. Her whole body’s tense, twitchy, nervous, clumsy, and everything Chloe does makes it worse. It’s awesome.

Finally, once the pie’s been cleared out, Max yawns and complains about getting up so early, since she had to drive for part of the trip, too. Chloe gets up when she does, giving a glare to Joyce, David, Ryan, and Vanessa in turn to ensure that they understood that they are not shifting Max off to the guest room, now that they all know they’re together and have the authority to stop them. They mostly look confused, so Chloe chalks it up as a win, and heads upstairs with Max, holding her hand tight, running her thumb over the back of her palm.

Once the door is closed, Max turns around and looks Chloe in the eye. “You are _impossible_ ,” she hisses, suppressing a grin.

“Like you weren’t doing it too,” Chloe retorts, grabbing her around the waist.

“We can’t, not here, they’re gonna hear,” Max whispers as Chloe presses them together, moving her hands to Max’s hips.

“I can be quiet,” Chloe assures her softly. “The shit I’ve done in this room...”

“I, uh,” and there’s that blush again, “I don’t know if _I_ can.”

“We could experiment.” Chloe leans in close, their lips only barely apart.

“I—no, I’m sorry, I would _die_ if my parents knew that they drove here so I could...”

“Fuck me?”

“Chloe!” Max jumps back while Chloe cackles.

After a minute, they look at each other, and Chloe feels the mood shift a bit. She turns off the confidence for a moment, lets go of the day’s giddiness, and tries to look at her seriously. “I just...I wanted to give you something, since you’re here, and tomorrow...” she admits, looking down.

“What?” Max looks confused for a minute, and then her face lights up. “Oh my God, we didn’t tell you.”

“Didn’t tell me what?”

“Part of the deal for today is that I’m staying here until school starts again. My stuff’s downstairs, I think Mom brought it in, anyway...”

Chloe needs a second. Gotta recalculate.

Okay. There we go.

“Well, shit!” She throws her arms out to the sides and smiles wide. “Never fucking mind, then! Yeah, we can wait ‘til they’re out of the house if you’re not comfortable. Jesus, how did you guys forget to tell me?”

Max breathes a sigh of relief, the mood effectively broken. “I guess we already knew, and you were wondering how we got here in the first place, so we didn’t talk about what would happen _after_ today.”

Chloe rushes forward and hugs her again. “Today keeps kicking ass,” she mumbles into the top of Max’s head. “So when’s the shit-train start?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, obviously the universe has to have something in for us. Get ready to use that rewind power,” Chloe advises, burrowing her face into Max’s hair. She’s saying all of this, and she believes it, but she doesn’t feel it. It’s not giving her a drop in her stomach or a shiver in her chest. It’s like an automated response that finally kicked in.

“Nothing bad is going to happen,” Max assures her, rubbing her back. “We’re here. We’re together. We’ve got time.”

Chloe believes that too.

“Okay,” she says as they separate. “Go get your pajamas and shit, then, I totally thought you were just trying to get up here for my sake. Are you really tired?”

“Chloe, I’ve been up since like one, I am _dead_ ,” Max says.

“All right.” Chloe lets loose a breath, and gives Max’s shoulder a squeeze. “I’ve missed sleeping with you, anyway.”

“Me too.” Max leans up and gives her a peck. “Won’t be long.”

As Max leaves, Chloe sits down on her bed, finding the scrapbook. She can’t look through it again right now, she’ll just cry, so she holds it to her chest for a minute like it’ll make this Christmas make sense. Like somehow it can reconcile the amount of love Chloe’s been shown with who she is. But nothing comes to mind. Maybe nothing should. Maybe there isn’t a reason it all worked out like this, and maybe life’s not about what you deserve, and maybe she does deserve it like Max says but the question is too heavy right now. So focus on something else. Like Max. Like sleeping with Max again.

She finds a spot for the scrapbook on her desk, deciding to give it a permanent home in the morning. Then, she decides to strip down to nothing but her boxers and hop into bed, pulling the covers up to her neck just as Max comes in with a duffel bag. She leisurely watches Max slip out of her clothes, putting on a pair of shorts and a faded pink t-shirt with a doe on it. As Max crawls in beside her, she starts to put her arms around Chloe, then freezes when her hands touch bare skin.

“Something wrong, Max?” Chloe taunts.

Max takes a second, then commits, lying on her side and resting a hand on Chloe’s chest. “Nope.”

Chloe feels a pleasant warmth at the idea. Max is comfortable. Max is fine. Max likes this. And she’ll be here tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. She won’t leave. She has, in fact, done everything she can to stay close to Chloe. It’s good to know that Chloe’s brain is a fucking liar.

 

* * *

 

Chloe isn’t sure what time it is or if she fell asleep, but Max’s fingers are moving, circling her nipple. She gasps as Max pinches, then releases, and repeats. “H-hey,” she whispers, eyes trying to adjust to the dark to see if Max is doing this in her sleep. No, she isn’t. “Max, you—you said we weren’t—”

“You were fine with it last time.” Max squeezes again, and Chloe shuts her eyes, bites her lip.

“L-last time I hadn’t had my hand in your pussy yet,” Chloe attempts, hoping for that automatic vulgarity response.

Max just chuckles. “I can’t help it. You twitch whenever I...” Her finger traces the edges of the bar.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Chloe breathes. “Of fucking course I do, they’re super sensitive, that’s the _point—_ ”

“Shh.” Max pulls back the covers to Chloe’s waist and leans down. Her lips graze the nipple that her hand isn’t playing with, and Chloe lets out a whimper. “I thought you said you could be quiet,” Max whispers, her breath hot on Chloe’s chest.

“H-hold on.” Chloe sits up and Max follows immediately, rising to her eye level. “I-I thought you wanted to wait, but if you keep doing this, I’m gonna—I’m gonna want more.”

“All right.” Max’s voice is low and it vibrates against Chloe’s neck and _shit_. “Then be quiet and you’ll get more.”

“Are you sure?” Chloe’s shaking. She can’t fuck this up. This is their first time they’re talking about, this is what they’re going to remember forever.

“I’ve been lying here for hours, Chloe, I changed my mind, I am _really_ sure right now.” Max’s words are a whispering babble, and Chloe knows she’s not lying. She can just barely see Max’s outline in the dark, and she’s not shaking, not nervous. Her breath fills the space between them. Waiting for an answer.

She leans forward and kisses Max, and that seals it. Max presses her up against the wall and her hands are right back to playing with Chloe’s piercings. Chloe bites her lip, remembers other times in this room, other people, wills her body to recall how to stay silent. She wants to demand, to growl at Max and tell her where to go, what to do to her, but that has to wait for other times, other places. Tonight it’s all touch and movement.

She gives a shuddering gasp as Max breaks the kiss and immediately goes for her chest, her tongue exploring the borders of one piercing until her lips seal around it and suck. Chloe lets her mouth hang open, nothing but half-choking sounds escaping her, channeling her urge to moan into her fingers, clenching at Max’s collar. When Max releases her with an audible _pop_ , Chloe tugs at her shirt, wanting it _off_ , wanting to _see_. Max gets the message and lets Chloe pull it over her head, and as soon as it’s off, Chloe goes straight for her bra, too, because fuck, she hasn’t gotten to see Max even half-naked yet and that’s not fair at all. The motion is familiar and easy, and as Max shrugs it off, Chloe stares hungrily, wanting to memorize. She has freckles there, too.

Max is clearly ready to go for Chloe again, but Chloe beats her to the punch, lunging forward and taking her breasts in her hands. Small, and soft, and evidently sensitive because Max lets out the tiniest squeal when Chloe squeezes. But Max pushes back, capturing Chloe’s lips and putting her against the wall again, her hands travelling lower. She is _not_ yielding to Chloe. Okay. Okay, Chloe can handle that.

She leans back and decides not to distract her from her goal, just wrapping her arms around Max to keep her close. Max pulls the covers down further, exposing Chloe’s legs. She grasps Chloe’s boxers and hovers there for a second, as if afraid to keep going, but before Chloe can comment she finds her courage and pulls. Chloe shivers as she feels the cold air strike her wet skin. But Max’s hand keeps her warm.

Her touch is tentative at first. Chloe holds her breath. Waiting and wanting and needing. But Max doesn’t need her direction, even if she really wants to give it, even if she’s going to next time, or whenever they can really get loud with each other. She’ll get there. And the way she explores, the way she tactily learns, is somehow _incredibly_ hot. Chloe remembers the confident, experienced strokes of Rachel, the drunk fumbling of idiotic men. This is so much better. Max isn’t trying to dominate her, or get herself off without a care. Max wants _her_ , and it’s clearer with every movement, the way her fingers slide between her lips until they find a spot Chloe reacts to.

Chloe pitches as a finger enters her, her hands moving to Max’s hair and clinging. Then a second, pumping in and out, and now Max has both hands hard at work. Chloe can just imagine her pursed lips, the concentrated look on her face, and she wants to laugh because she loves this girl so much. Instead, she bites the inside of her cheek, the shocks coming up from her aching clit sending her body into convulsions that she desperately tries to control, to hang on, make this last—

But she can’t, God, Max is paying too much attention, knows her too well already, and Chloe takes Max’s face in her hands and lets loose the lowest moan into her mouth that she can manage as she comes. Max puts her hands back on Chloe’s shoulders and keeps kissing her, softer and softer, laying her back down on the pillows. Chloe’s orgasm fades out like a sigh. Max is happy to lay on top of her, kissing her neck, her shoulders, her forehead, wherever. Chloe just holds her, and loves her.

Max gets up on her knees after they’ve enjoyed the afterglow for a while, then grabs Chloe’s hands and pulls her forward, sits her up. Max shifts herself, getting near the end of the bed and pulling off her bottoms while Chloe watches, staring like an idiot. Fuck, she’s gorgeous. Chloe can see the hair between her legs glistening. Finally, Max spreads herself and puts her hands behind herself to support her.

“You said something about ‘the main course’?” she murmurs, a shaky smile on her lips.

Chloe’s throat goes dry. _You talk too big a game, Price,_ she thinks. _Do not fuck this up._ But she’s done this before. She can manage. She can deliver this, at least, even if she’s not sure she can give Max anything more worthwhile. _Stop it_ , she thinks suddenly, _Fuck your insecurities. Fuck your girlfriend._

It takes a little bit of adjusting, but Chloe manages to get in a comfortable-ish position, her feet against the wall, Max’s lips in front of her, puffy, pink, ready. Chloe remembers how to do this. How to make her sing. And once her lips are on her pussy, her tongue enveloped in Max’s unique sharp taste, her mind stops processing anything as words and all that matters are the trembles in Max’s body, the whispered obscenities, the fingers crawling through her hair and down her neck. All that matters is Max.

Max’s hips start bucking into Chloe’s face, and Chloe’s felt what her work is doing, so she crawls forward a little more, gets up on her knees, and replaces her face with her hand. Because she has to see this. She has to watch as Max throws her head to the ceiling, her face twisting, into something like pain but smiling wide. Max’s body freezes for a moment, quivers in place, and then melts, collapsing into Chloe with faint giggles. Chloe tries to shush her, but that just makes the giggles come faster, and it’s so cute that Chloe has to relent. Fuck it, if anyone’s up, they can hear a little giggling.

Max recovers slightly, sniffing and exhaling sharply instead of really laughing, body loose and relaxed in Chloe’s arms. Chloe kisses the top of her head.

“I think your gift was pretty good, too,” Max murmurs.

God, Chloe loves this girl.

With a little work, she manages to get her legs in front of her and scoot back up the bed, laying her head down on the pillows with Max still clinging to her chest. “It’s gonna get cold in a second here,” Chloe warns, shaking her by the shoulder. Max grumbles, but she does retrieve the covers and throw them over herself before crawling back on top of Chloe.

The word ‘afterglow’ makes sense in a way that it didn’t before. Everything is fuzzy and light. Max falls asleep quickly, no doubt completely exhausted, but Chloe stays up until light peeks through the window and illuminates her face, at peace, her chest rising and falling.

Well, if the universe wants to kill her tomorrow, let it. There can’t be a better day left in the rest of time itself.


	9. Charting a Course

Chloe wakes up to a pounding at the door, Ryan’s voice calling, “Max?”

“Mhfmhmm,” Max mumbles into Chloe’s skin.

“We’re leaving soon. Make sure you’ve got everything.”

“Mghmm.”

Ryan’s feet retreat down the stairs. Chloe laughs softly as Max lifts her head up, her hair a disheveled mess across Chloe’s chest. “Eloquent, Caulfield,” she starts to say, but Max’s sleepy kiss cuts her off.

She lays her head back down. “You taste better now,” she murmurs.

Well. That settles that. Chloe can’t put a cigarette in her mouth ever again.

“Do I really have to get up?” Max whines, face still buried in Chloe.

“If you don’t want them barging in on us naked, probably.” Chloe shifts herself, just to feel the friction of their bare skin touching. She’d be fine with that. That’d teach them to leave her and Max alone for sure.

Max groans and rolls off of her, taking the covers with her. “ _Fine_.” As she gets up and stretches, Chloe takes the opportunity to really stare, see her skinny little body in its entirety. She laments that she can’t just grab her and pull her back, because she didn’t even play with her little tits last night and looking at her now, that’s a crying shame.

Max catches her eye and blushes down to her navel. “A-aren’t you gonna get dressed?”

“Nah. I’ll just wait for you to come back. Give ‘em my best and whatever.” Chloe leans her head back on the pillow and closes her eyes. “You kept me up too long.”

She hears a guilty giggle and smiles to herself, imagining what it’ll be like when she comes back, what they could get up to once at least one set of parents is out of the house. There’s a strange sound, and she opens her eyes to see Max knelt before the bed, camera in front of her face.

“Max, what are you—” Click. “Are you being real right now, Max.” Click. “You’re ridiculous.” Click.

“Sorry.” Max puts down the camera. “Y-you just looked so beautiful...”

“No, it’s cool, but if you’re really worried about people finding out, maybe don’t make a whole bunch of photographic evidence?” Chloe suggests, propping herself up on her elbows.

“It’s just for me.”

“Put some clothes on before I jump you.”

Chloe wraps the covers back around herself and watches Max dress, and once she’s out of the room, she rolls on her side, closes her eyes again, and tries to just fall back to sleep. But then her brain starts talking.

_Clingy bitch. As soon as she sleeps with you, it’s all you want to do, like this is the endgame. All you’re gonna do is distract her now, keep her away from her future, drag her down into just this stupid, shallow relationship, get her hooked on drugs. You’re going to ruin her. You should make her go back to Seattle and forget about you._

She picks at fluff on the pillowcase, trying to ignore the sick feeling in her stomach. God dammit. God dammit, she was happy. She was comfortable, she was loved, she was going somewhere. Why now? Why doesn’t it shut up, why doesn’t it go away? She _knows_ it’s bullshit, all of yesterday proves that, so why does it still hurt? What does she have to do?

It’s not just sad, it’s fucking _frustrating._ How come she’s not strong enough to just ignore these bullshit ideas? Why does she still want to cry for no reason? She works so damn hard to be better, and it’s not enough. It’s totally out of her control. It just _happens_ , without warning, without reason. And the harder she pushes against it, the louder it gets, reminding her of Rachel and Nathan and that fucked-up week in October and the way Max went through hell for her, shouting down reality, coating everything in a layer of blood and shit.

She realizes she’s shaking and tense when she hears the door open, a suitcase dropping onto the floor. She squeezes her muscles and shuts her eyes tight, trying to calm down, trying to stay still. She feels Max’s hand on her shoulder.

“Hey, Chloe, are you doing okay?”

“Sorry,” Chloe says with a sniff. “I—Fucking stupid. Same shit as always. Don’t—it doesn’t matter.”

Max’s hand travels up and down her side, soothing, soft. “Please, Chloe, what’s wrong?”

“Just another attack of the sadbrains, okay?” Chloe exclaims, wrenching herself away. “Like, if I tell you every stupid shitty thought, you’re just gonna say all the right things and it’ll kind of work but it’s still gonna be in there and I just want to fucking skip it.”

Max shifts behind her, lying down, reaching beneath the covers and touching Chloe’s bare skin. “Okay. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

“I’m so fucking tired of it.”

“I know.” Max’s fingers tremble. _You’re scaring her, of course you are, because she went through everything to save your worthless ass and you still hate yourself, you still want to blow your brains out and save her and everyone else from your problems. You’re so fucking bad for her. You’re always going to do this, and that’s always gonna keep that October right in front in her head._

Max presses herself against Chloe’s body, and the fight’s gone out of her, everything’s just drifting through her head without contest. But somehow, they stop overpowering her. The room around her comes back into focus, Max’s warmth tethering her. She finds herself breathing deeply, as if to expel the shivers through her lungs. Other sensations are allowed to come in, the scent of eggs frying from downstairs, the chill of the air on her nose. And things quiet down. It’s all still there, still rattling around in her skull, but other things are talking over it.

She swallows, then lets out a sigh. “Sorry,” she whispers again, shame replacing despair. “I shouldn’t—I’m such a pussy sometimes, I swear.”

“You’re not...you’re not weak, or whatever you think you are. You’re still going through a tough time. So am I,” Max assures her. “I told you before. You don’t have to be perfect.”

“Fuck, Max, I’ve been like this for...for so long, since you left, basically. Don’t make excuses for me. I’m just fucking broken.” Chloe’s voice rises with the last sentence, anger flaring in her chest. She wraps her arms tight around herself, wants to disappear.

“I still love you.”

Chloe chokes on an unexpected sob. Max turns her over, on her back, so they can see each other. She lifts a strand of Chloe’s hair out of her eyes and kisses her. “I still love you,” she repeats, “and I know you’ll survive. And you’ll do great. Because I’m with you.”

Chloe looks into her eyes, and decides that she can believe that, for now. She just gives a nod because her voice is gonna come out all wet and shitty if she tries to tell Max how much she loves her back. Max wipes her eyes for her, then takes her hands.

“Come on. Let’s get breakfast before Joyce yells at us.”

Chloe hugs her. Because she understands, somehow, what to say, how to distract Chloe. Maybe it’s time-magic, but Max gets her, and she can’t ever say thank you or I love you enough. So Chloe won’t be perfect, ever, probably. She has a girlfriend who can take it.

 

* * *

 

And that’s the way it is.

Most of the time, Chloe can focus, think about what she wants to do, and she can also lose focus when she wants to, like when Max tugs at her shirt and pulls her away from studying and into bed. She doesn’t want to smoke, even when shit stops making sense and she feels like she’s banging her head against the wall. Instead, she cuddles up with Max and watches something or listens to music or just kisses her for a while until the frustration’s worked out. Or she loses focus.

Max insists that Chloe doesn’t _haaave_ to study, it’s Christmas break after all, but she really does. It keeps her level, somehow, having this problem to solve. As long as she works at it a little each day, it seems to keep her from the worst episodes.

But episodes do come. At random, of course, when she should be comfortable and happy and relaxed. She’ll be on the couch with Max, watching some truly abysmal new anime show and mocking it every step of the way, and they’ll creep in, and she’ll get quiet. But she tries to just let it pass, or just concentrate on the moment, on Max, usually. Max notices, and she steps up the physical affection because she knows Chloe doesn’t want to talk, rubbing her hand or sinking into her chest, just reminding Chloe that she’s there. And the attack passes, and it’s okay.

Max’s appetite is better than just _okay_ , though. Jesus. Now that the seal’s apparently broken, Chloe finds that Max wasn’t lying about ‘really wanting to, more often that you think.’ Every night, Max starts with her piercings and just keeps going, and when Joyce and David are out of the house, all bets are off. Turning her down is impossible, even if once or twice, afterward, Chloe thinks that maybe she should’ve because it’s just giving her sick brain fuel for that _you’re-turning-her-into-a-sex-slave_ garbage.

But she’s so fucking cute when she comes, her giggling little orgasms, her flushed skin, her sparkling eyes. And she’s always topping, which is _amazing_. It means Chloe doesn’t need to worry about pushing too far or hurting her, it means that she’s never just giving into pressure from her, it means guilt-free pleasure in the moment and no need to question anything until after the fire dies down. Maybe it’s just that she doesn’t have much else to do during Christmas break besides wander Arcadia Bay and take pictures, but damn. Chloe could get used to this.

 

* * *

 

New Year’s Eve comes around, and with it comes an invitation in the group text. Chloe rolls over in bed and puts her phone in front of Max. “Whaddya think?” she asks.

Max reads for a second, then makes a face. “Eugh, isn’t that basically gonna be a Vortex Club party? Hard pass.”

“‘Bout what I figured.” Chloe texts back a denial. A second later, another message pops up from Juliet: _Kinda figured that wasn’t Max’s speed. We’re gonna have an afterparty at Justin’s around 2, though, his parents aren’t home. You guys can come by then if you want!_

Chloe reads the message aloud, and Max says, “Oh, yeah, that sounds way better. Who’s coming?”

“Justin, Warren, Dana, and ‘anyone else we like who’s down,’” Chloe reads.

“Put us down for a yes on that.” Max shifts herself onto her side and watches as Chloe sends back a confirmation, then plucks the phone from her fingers. “But what are we gonna do in the meantime? How could we possibly stay up till two in the morning?” she asks as she lays the phone down on the nightstand, then starts drawing designs on Chloe’s chest.

“Caulfield, you are a goddamned _lech_ ,” Chloe says, shoving her back. “It is like nine in the morning. Even I can’t make it last that long.”

Max puts on an exaggerated pouting face for a minute, but then her resolve seems to waver. “I...I thought you liked it,” she says, sitting up and rubbing the back of her neck.

“No no no no no, Max, holy shit, I like it,” Chloe says immediately, grabbing her by the shoulders. She cannot make Max feel insecure or dirty or clingy or perverted because she is not any of those things and she is perfect and wonderful just the way she is. “These last few days _ruled._ But let’s save it, okay? It’s New Year’s. Let’s make it special.”

“Sorry, I just...” Max smiles at her. “It’s so easy, and it’s fun, and it just seemed like whenever I wanted to I could, and I kind of want to a _lot_ whenever I look at you, and I love making you happy like that...”

“I’m putting on a fuckin’ bra now,” Chloe says, getting up out of bed and stretching. “Maybe that’ll calm you down.”

“No promises.”

 

* * *

 

David and Joyce are out at the Blackwell faculty party, so it’s just Chloe and Max, lying on the couch in the living room, the only light coming from the TV screen. Chloe looked up the director of that movie that she’d seen before Max got here, and so found herself another weird film for Max. It’s about bowling, and kidnapping, and it is fucking hilarious. She feels Max’s body shake in her arms when The Dude (at least his name is easy to remember) shouts something about being housebroken, and it feels warm and nice. She looks so happy. Content. Chloe can imagine a future where this never stops, where they live on their own somewhere and come home from work and just be together, no time limits, nobody to get in their way, no oncoming school year or difficult tests hanging over their heads. She sinks into the couch and thinks about how to make it happen, barely watching the screen, her attention on the little form lying against her.

The archaic VCR display above the TV reads 11:59, and Max takes the remote from the coffee table and pauses the screen, then turns over. Chloe positions her head against the armrest and hums as Max crawls up her body for their New Year’s kiss.

“Happy new year, Chloe,” Max murmurs after they break apart, resting her head under Chloe’s chin. “We made it.”

2014\. Back in October, there was a party called The End of the World. It felt like the title was accurate when Chloe’s life was crashing down around her. Now everything is settled. Building up to something better, in fact.

“I thought you wanted to fuck,” Chloe says after a minute of Max happily nestling in.

Max laughs. “Mmm. Sounds like too much right now. I like this.”

Chloe agrees. Calm feels like what she needs, right now. A moment to think, to plan. “Well, then, put the movie back on, dork,” she says, ruffling Max’s hair.

After a few more minutes of Max lying on top of her and the movie’s lights playing out across them, she knows she’s falling asleep.  So she takes a second and sets an alarm on her phone, and then succumbs. A two-hour nap with Max sounds like just the thing before a party.

When it goes off, Max jumps up first, Chloe barely registering it. The DVD menu’s been looping for a while. Max shuts it off while Chloe yawns and cracks her neck.

“Ready to go?” Max asks. “Or do we wanna show up fashionably late?”

“Hmmm...” Chloe thinks for a second. About how to ring in the new year, make it start better than the last one. “Just need to grab one thing.”

She runs upstairs and finds her old jacket on the floor, and draws out her last emergency pack of cigarettes, untouched for weeks. She stuffs it in the new jacket, then pads downstairs to where Max is waiting at the door.

As they drive towards Justin’s house, the road curves along the beach. Chloe pulls over to the shoulder and puts the truck in park. “One second,” she promises, drawing out the pack.

“Chloe, no,” Max groans.

“Not what you think.” She opens her door and runs across the empty road, winding up her throw. As she lets the pack fly, it pops open, scattering cigarettes to the sea wind, vanishing into the dark. She smiles at the sight.

As she gets back in, she says, “They’d stink up my fancy new jacket.” And Max crawls across the seats and gives her a long kiss, and Chloe knows that was the right move.

They pull up in front of a rather fancy suburban house, looking far too clean to be Justin’s — but it’s got Juliet’s hand-me-down minivan parked in the driveway, so it’s gotta be the place. And Warren answers the door.

“Maaaaaax!” he slurs, wrapping her up in a big hug. “You came!”

“Nice to see you too, nerdboy,” Chloe snorts as Max steps back, smiling.

“Well, yeah, you too, but she was gone,” Warren says.

“We haven’t seen each other since break started, either.”

“I—You know—”

“She’s fucking with you,” Max helpfully informs him.

“I’m fucking with you,” Chloe confirms, slapping a hand on his shoulder. “Where are the rest of you losers? Brooke here?”

Warren wavers in place, looking back and forth between them, before snapping to attention. “Nooo,” he moans, “She’s gooone and it sucks.”

“Believe me, I know,” Chloe says.

“Yours came back, though.”

“Not everyone’s as cool as Max, sorry to say.” Chloe ruffles Max’s hair, to her weak protest. “Seriously, though, you gonna let us in? It’s freezing out here.”

“Right, sorry.” Warren waves them through the doorway and leads them down into a basement, dimly lit by a ceiling light that reveals three more figures arranged in a half-circle of furniture around an inactive television. Chloe smells weed the second she gets off the final step. She recognizes Justin cuddled up to Juliet, his head in her lap on the sofa, holding a smoking pipe in the air as if waiting for someone to take it. As soon as they’re halfway into the room, Dana leaps up from a beanbag chair and rushes over to Max, giving her a hug and shouting her name.

“You get a hug too,” she says after releasing Max, quickly closing the distance and squeezing Chloe tight.

“Yeah, come over here,” Juliet calls as Warren takes a seat on a recliner, “Both of you.”

“We saved the loveseat for you,” Justin informs them as Max leans down for a sitting hug from Juliet.

“Yeah, from what Warren says, you guys need it,” Dana giggles in the corner. Max turns beet-red.

“Aw, man, don’t tell her I told you!” Warren groans. “God, sorry, Max, I got way too wasted back there—”

“The fuck were you even doing running around the backroads on Christmas anyway, Graham?” Chloe challenges, snapping up the pipe while Juliet hugs her around the waist. “Yeah, we saw your ass. Fuckin’ honking at us and shit.”

“I was goin’ to my dad’s, God,” Warren says.

“Okay, whatever.” Chloe takes a hit and offers the pipe to Max.

“What did he tell you?” Max asks quietly as she hesitantly takes it.

“Just that you two were makin’ out in that shitmobile Chloe calls a truck by the side of the road,” Dana says. “That’s how he learned Max was back in town, actually.”

 _So nothing about my hand in her panties, good,_ Chloe thinks as she looks over to Max. She notices her looking confusedly at the pipe. “Like this,” Chloe says as Max lifts the pipe to her mouth, showing her where to block the carb, sliding her thumb off of it when she looks like she’s about to start choking. She coughs, still blushing, and holds the pipe in the air as though waiting for someone to grab it. Justin makes grabby-motions with his hand, so Chloe helpfully transfers the piece and leads her struggling lightweight girlfriend to the loveseat.

“Didn’t know Max smoked,” Juliet says, leaning forward.

“I tried once, with Chloe,” Max says, clearly grateful for the change of subject. “I—I liked it.”

Chloe smirks at the memory and puts an arm around Max’s shoulders, kicking her feet up on the coffee table.

“Jeez, what are you doing to this girl?” Juliet asks.

The thought kind of stabs at Chloe’s heart, but she powers through it. “Hey, she started it. Also, bite me.”

“There’s the Chloe we know and love,” Dana says, nestling her back into her beanbag chair.

Justin raises the pipe into the air again, dangling it under Juliet’s nose. “C’moooon,” he taunts. Juliet playfully pushes his hand away.

“Dana said I had to be sober so I didn’t hook up with Zach again,” she explains to Chloe’s confused look.

“See, that’s a good friend right there,” Chloe says, pointing at the girl now halfway inside of her chair. “And you guys also needed a DD, right?”

“And we needed a DD,” Juliet admits.

“It really is good to see all you guys again,” Max says suddenly. “I’m glad you’ve been keeping Chloe company.”

“Yeah, ‘cause she was moping around like a zombie. It was charity work. I should get volunteer hours,” Juliet says.

“Watch it, Jules.”

“But it’s great to see you too, Max. Obviously you couldn’t keep away from each other.” Juliet leans back, but her eyes stay fixed on Chloe. “So what are you gonna do after graduation?”

“I, uh...” Max rubs her nose and sniffs. “We haven’t really talked about it yet.”

Chloe’s heart races as she considers what she was thinking about a few hours ago. “Well, actually,” she begins, trying to turn those ideas into words. Max looks up at her, raising her eyebrows. Chloe gulps, and says quickly, “Well Max applied to a bunch of colleges so I’m gonna get my GED and look for trade schools near wherever she gets in so that we can get an apartment and our parents would probably pay for it and then we could be together!”

There’s a brief silence, and then Juliet laughs. “You’ve been thinking about the future. I didn’t know you could do that.”

“I think it sounds great,” Max says, leaning up and kissing Chloe on the cheek, and that calms her nerves.

“But what kinda trade school?” Warren pipes up. “Like, what are you gonna do?”

“So, I’m, like, thinking welding or like, car repair, something like that, that I can do with my hands...”

Chloe is basically spinning her future plans freeform to this group of half-wasted high school kids, but it all feels possible. Max gets more and more cuddly, especially as the pipe makes its way around the room, and even if she’s not the one asking the questions, she seems to be happy with the answers. Chloe talks about schools she’s already looked at, things David and Joyce have said, but what she’s really thinking about is that apartment, with this girl, working out their lives together.

Eventually, the conversation shifts to some dumb shit Victoria did at the real party, but Chloe doesn’t stop thinking about it.

Neither does Max. They hold onto each other in the dim light and dream of a new year, and a world stretching out before them, full of possibilities.


	10. Clear Skies

Max still sees the doe, from time to time.

She’s getting bolder. Max sees her in November, outside the Blackwell dorms when she runs out in the middle of the night, heart aching for Chloe. She sees her in December, sitting placidly in front of the Price-Madsen’s porch, getting up in no hurry while the car inches up the driveway. She stands by the seaside on the first of January as Chloe throws her cigarettes to the wind. It feels like a secret friend, that only she can see, still watching out for her. She’s given up trying to get her picture. Film doesn’t preserve her.

She doesn’t tell Chloe.

She also doesn’t tell her how often she thinks of October, the storm vision that started everything during a photography lecture. Chloe wants to forget it, and Max can’t blame her, but she’s always aware of the rewind power sitting in her skull, the half-dozen realities she crossed through photographic boundaries before settling back into this one. She turns it all over in her mind while Chloe talks about getting an apartment together. She’s so grounded, sometimes. Max knows her own head goes to the clouds a lot, but, well, she does have superpowers.

She remembers Chloe saying once, that maybe Rachel was working through her in October, leading them to justice, or revenge. Chloe’s thoughts about that girl are impossible to pin down. Sometimes, she talks about how much she misses her, how much she loved her, and it’s hard not to feel jealous. Other times, Chloe’s in a rage, calling her a cheating bitch, a lying whore who had the whole town wrapped around her finger and got what she deserved for fucking with creeps like Nathan and Jefferson. She cries after she says that, though. Max gets the impression that it will take a long time for her to sort out out her feelings, because Jefferson took away the chance.

The doe keeps showing up throughout the rest of the school year. Visible through the window when she walks into her dorm and sees Chloe beaming, an electronic diploma open on the screen behind her. Looking in through the tea shop door as Max and Kate talk about college, keeping in touch. And then, as Max leaves the bathroom and starts heading back to science class, she’s _inside_ , standing just in front of the entrance to Blackwell. Max freezes in place.

The doe looks right at her and blinks. Then it turns and trots right through the glass doors, and vanishes in the daylight. Max returns to Chloe that day with her head spinning, collapses against her, memories of nosebleeds and headaches coming at her without her permission. Chloe doesn’t ask. Probably doesn’t feel like she has the right to. Max sometimes wishes she would ask, wishes sometimes that Chloe could get as sharp and cutting with her as she sometimes gets with other people. But Chloe’s always going to think she’s special, better than her, even if the pedestal’s not all that tall anymore and they’re comfortable with each other. Max knows that only time will heal some wounds.

The last time she sees the doe is in May.

Chloe wakes her up early, before sunrise. To celebrate her graduation, to get ready to leave Arcadia Bay and get on that roadtrip to Seattle, she has a thought. She wraps a bandanna over Max’s eyes and leads her out to the truck, making sure that she’s got her camera. Once they’re parked wherever they’re going, Chloe takes her hand. Max feels the rough dirt path underneath her, smells the forest surrounding her, notices the incline as they walk. She can feel Chloe’s pulse.

Finally, Chloe pushes her down onto a bench and gently lifts off the blindfold. Max already knows where she is, but she gasps at the sight. Arcadia Bay, almost unlit, the thin blue light of dawn just barely reaching into it from the horizon. The lighthouse, an old friend, sits beside them as if watching this for the first time.

“Thought you’d like to see it one more time before we go,” Chloe says nervously, twitching her fingers as she sits down next to Max. “Take as many pictures as you want.”

Max knows that trying to express how wonderful this is would just make Chloe try to deny any effort, so she just kisses her, then brings her camera out of her bag and aims it straight at Chloe, trying to get her profile against the lighthouse. As she presses the shutter, everything stops.

The soft wind in the trees vanishes, the distant sound of waves turning to silence. The world becomes monochrome, dead, unmoving. Like when Kate stood on the edge of the roof. Max feels a pain in her chest, her pulse spiking, fingers clenched on the camera, willing it to stop, to go away. She doesn’t want this power anymore. She doesn’t need it. Arcadia Bay is _safe_. Chloe is _fine_.

But she slowly realizes that there’s no pain in her head, no blood in her nose. She’s not sure how long time has been stopped — maybe a minute? — but it’s not her doing it. She lets the camera drop to her waist, and there she is.

The doe stands at the edge of the cliff, right in front of the bench, staring directly at her. A single blue feather dangles from her head, not pinned but simply growing out of the fur. Max’s throat goes dry. She's waiting for something.

Max reaches out her hand, and the doe steps forward and dips her head towards Max. Max’s fingers reach for the feather. As soon as they touch, Max understands.

Rachel was not the first to suffer and die here at the hands of predatory men. But she was a strong personality, a force of nature, and the same thing that drew the attention of the monsters at Blackwell roused the restless feminine spirits of the Bay. They saw a storm coming to drown the world in sorrow and horror, and Rachel directed their energy to an unassuming, good-hearted girl, and gave her the power to stop and reverse time itself. To save anyone else from suffering as she had. To save someone she loved. To ensure that justice would be served without the need for any more deaths. Not Kate’s. Not Victoria’s. Not even Nathan’s or Jefferson’s. And especially, not Chloe’s.

Max can sense the persistence of Rachel, the way she’s strained against tradition, even in death. She can see it in the doe’s eyes, Rachel’s eyes, gray and unnervingly human, not the black dots of an animal. She’s kept it all going longer than it was supposed to. It should have been over that Friday in October. But Rachel didn’t want to leave, not without making sure.

They have no way to thank each other enough. The doe rubs her head against Max’s hand, her ears folding under her fingers. She looks to Chloe, and pushes up under her chin, resting her eyes for a moment. Then, she looks back to Max, blinks, and turns around. She readies her muscles and leaps down into the sea below. The feather flies up from the cliff, free of bonds, and settles in Max’s waiting hands. Color comes back to the world.

“Woah, Max, are you okay?” Chloe asks, eyes widening immediately when she catches a glimpse of her face. “Jesus, you look like you saw a ghost.”

 _I did_ , Max wants to say, but that’s too much to explain, and what good would it do, anyway? But she has to tell Chloe something. And she knows what just happened, without even needing to test it. She clenches the feather tight.

“The rewind is gone,” she says, tearing dropping from her eyes. “It’s really over.”

Chloe wraps her in a hug and Max sobs into her shoulder, relief flooding her veins, as if she’s been holding her breath for as long as she’s kept her power, fearing having to use it again, fearing that Chloe won’t be safe unless she has this gift. Now that it’s gone, it’s as if someone has finally just said, “She will live,” and Max can believe it.

The feather goes at the end of the Chloe scrapbook. Max can’t explain it. She has to tape it back there, keep it safe. Chloe doesn’t question it. She runs her fingers through it and shivers, but she doesn’t ask why, or where it came from. Maybe she knows too.

Through all the years, the blue never fades.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading.
> 
> This turned into a shockingly personal project in a big hurry, which is probably why I wrote it at the pace of a crazy person. I guess the game had more impact on me than I cared to admit. Anyone who really knows me in real life would see every beat of this story and know where I pulled it from. It's been hugely therapeutic, to go back and explore what being among an eclectic group of losers, overachievers, nerds, outcasts, and dropouts is like. Maybe it's a strange way to pay tribute to the people who moved me through those confusing and difficult times, some of whom are lost now, but hey. Life is strange.


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